The government project undertaken to prepare the country s first-ever poverty registry has not been completed in more than seven years, with the data collected for it already rendered useless.
The National Household Database (NHD), initially known as the Bangladesh Poverty Database, is meant to help streamline the beneficiary selection process for social safety net programmes by gathering socioeconomic data of each household in the country.
Implemented in collaboration between the Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics (BBS) and the Department of Disaster Management (DDM), the project beginning in 2013 was supposed to be completed by 2017.
But the Tk 328 crore project, financed by the government and the World Bank, saw its deadline pushed to June 2021 and cost balloon to Tk 727 crore.