Floods Become the Third Major Test for the Government

Floods Mark Third Major Crisis Facing Government Since Taking Office
The flooding now stranding more than 150,000 people across greater Chattogram, with conditions deteriorating in Sylhet, Rangpur and beyond, ought to be assessed not in isolation but as the third in a sequence of structural shocks this government has absorbed since taking office. Those sequencing matters. It changes the analytical question from “can this government manage a flood” to “how has this government performed under compounding pressure,” which is a more honest frame given the timeline involved.
The starting conditions were themselves adverse. The BNP government inherited an economy substantially degraded by the fascist Hasina regime’s final years, a period marked by politically motivated prosecutions of private entrepreneurs, arson and looting targeting industrial facilities, and chronic gas and electricity shortages that suppressed private investment. The resulting figures are stark: an estimated 15 million people unemployed, 20 million below the poverty line, and, according to World Bank Vice-President Martin Raiser, only 8.7 million jobs created against 14 million new labor market entrants over the preceding decade. This was the baseline the incoming administration inherited, not a condition it produced.
Superimposed on this domestic legacy was an exogenous geopolitical shock. The eruption of conflict involving Iran, the United States and Israel disrupted global energy markets and closed the Strait of Hormuz to normal trade flows, with direct transmission effects into Bangladesh’s fuel prices, transport costs and export competitiveness. The government’s response, two successive domestic fuel price increases, should be read as an accommodation to an external constraint rather than a discretionary policy failure. The macroeconomic data bears this out: export earnings fell 1.5% to $35.57 billion in FY2025-26, RMG earnings declined nearly 2% to $32.64 billion, and private sector credit growth fell to 4.75%, its lowest level in two decades. Government borrowing rose 30.37% to compensate. These are the signatures of an economy absorbing external shock, not of policy mismanagement.
Against this backdrop, the government’s first national budget, structured around anti-corruption measures, curbs on money laundering and reduced wasteful expenditure, represents a coherent attempt to address the institutional weaknesses left by the previous regime while operating under active external constraint. That two objectives, structural reform and crisis management, were pursued simultaneously is itself analytically significant; it suggests policy continuity rather than reactive improvisation.
The floods now compound this picture as a third, largely exogenous shock, arriving at the start of the new fiscal year and disproportionately affecting already vulnerable populations, women, children, the elderly and persons with disabilities, in a country whose position on the Global Food Security Index was already weak. Whether this test is met successfully will depend less on any single government intervention than on the coordination of state capacity, opposition restraint and civil society mobilization, precisely the conditions under which post-disaster recovery has historically succeeded in Bangladesh.
The relevant conclusion is not that this government has avoided difficulty. It is that a government inheriting a degraded economic base has, in five months, absorbed a geopolitical energy shock and produced a first budget with a discernible reform logic, before the floods even arrived. That sequencing is worth holding in mind before rendering judgment on how the current crisis is handled.