B Mirror Report
In the upcoming fiscal year, interest will have to account for around 15% of the budget. According to reports, this sector will receive 1 lakh 22 thousand 500 crore taka in the upcoming fiscal year 2025–2026, compared to 1 lakh 13 thousand 500 crore taka in the current fiscal year’s main budget.
Therefore, compared to the present fiscal year (2024-2025), interest expenditures will rise by 9 thousand crore taka in the upcoming fiscal year. Previously, the government had to spend 1 lakh 14 thousand crore taka on the interest sector during the fiscal year 2023–2024. The Ministry of Finance has disclosed this information.
Dr. Salehuddin Ahmed, Finance Advisor, will read the national budget for the fiscal year 2025–2026 on Betar-TV on June 2. At 4 p.m., the budget speech will be televised.
According to a previous forecast from the Finance Department, interest expenses will rise by 1 lakh 37 thousand crore taka during the fiscal year 2025–2026. However, a source claimed that because the next budget was cut to less than 8 lakh crore taka, interest expenses had not yet reached this level.
Earlier, the Finance Department had mentioned that the reason for the increase in interest expenditure was that the amount of rigid and semi-flexible loans in terms of financing from foreign sources is gradually increasing. As a result, the interest rate in this sector is also increasing. In addition, due to the depreciation of the taka and the increase in global interest rates, the implicit interest rate of foreign sources will increase from 1 percent in the 2020-2021 fiscal year to 2 percent in the 2025-2026 fiscal year.
The Finance Department said that the government’s estimated interest expenditure in the medium term indicates the trend of increasing government expenditure in this sector. According to the interest payment estimate, the interest expenditure in the 2021 fiscal year was 77 thousand 77 crore taka. There, it will increase to 1 lakh 54 thousand 500 crore taka in the 2026-2027 fiscal year. The decrease-increase in interest payment is noticeable in proportion to the total budget. Interest expenditure decreased from 15.3 percent of the budget in the 2021-2022 fiscal year to 12.4 percent in the 2023-2024 fiscal year, but it may increase again to 15.3 percent in the 2026-2027 fiscal year.
A look at the budget documents shows that interest expenditure in the budget is increasing every year. In the revised budget for the 2020-2021 fiscal year, the expenditure on interest is estimated at 70,600 crore taka. In the original budget, it was 63,801 crore taka.
An estimated 56,300 crore taka will be spent on domestic interest out of all interest expenses. An estimated 4,300 crore taka will be spent on interest on foreign loans. Similar to this, the interest was Tk 70,800 crore in the fiscal year 2021–2022, Tk 90,000 crore in the fiscal year 2022–2023, Tk 94,300 crore in the fiscal year 2023–24, Tk 1,15,400 crore in the fiscal year 2024–25, and Tk 1,38,300 crore in the final fiscal year 2025–26.
