Retirement and Pension System in Bangladesh

M Alimullah Miyan

Doctor
Vice-Chancellor & Founder
IUBAT — International University of Business Agriculture and Technology
Dhaka, Bangladesh
E-mail: miyan@iubat.edu

Abstract

The retirement issue mostly relates to those who are in job situation and the retirement age in public service is 57 years. The agriculture sector has no retirement concept as also the case in self-employment. The aspects of retirement in terms of age, old age welfare and social impact have been discussed in this paper.

Pension system in Bangladesh is mainly observed in government services. The pension issues are settled according to the rules of the Public Servants (Retirement) Act of 1974. There are four categories of pensions which have been elaborated and analyzed in the paper.

There are about 36 million labors working in agriculture sector in the country, who are not covered by pensions. Similarly migrant workers do not receive any pension. There is no provision of pension for private sector workers. They only receive some gratuity at retirement.

Government has recently introduced Old Age Allowance Programme which covers small fraction of elderly people in the country who are not covered by pension system. Although limited in coverage, this is a healthy beginning of providing security to vast majority of the elderly people who are not covered by the existing pension system.

Family support is the basic security of most elderly people in Bangladesh. Policy level initiatives and institutional arrangements to provide social security to the elderly outside the family system is quite limited. There is a felt need for evolving a retirement and pension system that will be fair, equitable to all segments of the society, meet the constitutional obligation of social security for the elderly and