For generations, giving away a house in Bangladesh has carried a simple legal consequence: once the gift is completed, the property belongs to somebody else.
That proposition has produced problems inside families. Parents transfer a house, a piece of land or other property to their children while they are still alive, sometimes to settle inheritance questions early and sometimes simply because they trust them. Then relations sour. The parents discover that generosity and security are not necessarily the same thing.
Bangladesh’s Parliament moved on Sunday to change that equation.
The Jatiya Sangsad passed the Transfer of Property (Amendment) Bill, 2026, creating explicit legal recognition for what lawyers call a lifetime usufruct…the right of a person to continue using and enjoying property even after ownership has been transferred to someone else.
In its simplest form, the new arrangement works like this. A father can give his house to his daughter today. She becomes its owner. But if the deed reserves his lifetime right of enjoyment, he can continue living there and using the property until he dies. His gift no longer has to mean his eviction.
That sounds like a technical alteration to a law written under British rule in 1882. It is more consequential than that.
The amendment effectively separates two things that families often treat as one: ownership of property and the right to enjoy it. It permits the title to move from one generation to another without requiring the older generation to surrender the economic and physical security attached to the property.
The old Transfer of Property Act did not expressly provide such a mechanism.
Section 122 of the 1882 law defines a gift as the voluntary transfer of existing movable or immovable property without consideration from a donor to a recipient, or donee. The gift must be accepted during the donor’s lifetime. Section 123 requires a gift of immovable property to be made through a registered instrument, signed by or on behalf of the donor and attested by at least two witnesses.
And once a gift is completed, undoing it is deliberately difficult. Under Section 126, a gift can be suspended or revoked under narrowly defined circumstances, including an agreed event that does not depend merely on the donor changing his or her mind. A provision allowing the donor simply to take the gift back at will is invalid.
The problem, therefore, was not that Bangladesh lacked a law on gifts. It had a detailed one. Nor was it necessarily impossible for sophisticated parties to construct arrangements involving different interests in property.
The problem identified by the government was more specific…that the statute did not expressly establish a recognised form of family gift under which ownership could be transferred while the donor reserved the right to use and enjoy that property for life.
The BNP government argues that this uncertainty left elderly property owners unnecessarily vulnerable after transferring assets to children or other close relatives.
The amendment attempts to remove that ambiguity by adding Sections 122A and 122B and turning the arrangement into a distinct statutory form of transfer. It covers transfers between parents and children, grandparents and grandchildren in either direction, as well as transfers between spouses.
For immovable property, the arrangement must be recorded through a registered deed. Ownership and enjoyment then travel on separate tracks.
The recipient receives ownership. The donor keeps the specified lifetime right to use or enjoy the property. Even if the recipient dies before the donor, the donor's usufruct survives; ownership passes according to law to the recipient's heirs, but they take it subject to the donor's continuing lifetime right.
That distinction is the core of the legislation.
It is also the source of the dispute that turned what might otherwise have been an obscure property amendment into a verbal confrontation on the floor of Parliament.
The opposition Jamaat-e-Islami led alliance argued that the law risks intruding upon rules governing heba, wills and inheritance under Muslim personal law. Several opposition lawmakers said the government was constructing, through ordinary property legislation, a mechanism that could allow Muslims to arrange family property in ways they considered inconsistent with the Quran and Sunnah.
Opposition Leader Shafiqur Rahman did not dispute the humanitarian purpose of protecting elderly parents. His objection was to the legal route chosen to accomplish it.
He invoked the Quranic provisions on inheritance and argued that Muslim rules governing heba, wasiyyah and succession could not simply be treated as incidental to a new secular property mechanism. He asked the government not to pass the bill during the current session and instead to refer the proposal to Islamic-law experts and the Islamic Foundation for examination.
Other Jamaat lawmakers went further. Barrister Nazibur Rahman described the proposal as contrary to the Quran and Sunnah and reminded the BNP of its pre-election assurances that it would not enact legislation inconsistent with them. Kamrul Hasan accused the government of indirectly entering the territory of Muslim family law while presenting the measure as protection for parents.
The opposition walked out as the measure was put to a vote. Its members had also sought further public scrutiny and referral of the legislation for additional examination. Those proposals were defeated by voice vote, as were proposed amendments. The bill itself then passed by voice vote.
The government’s answer was essentially that Jamaat was arguing against a law it had not actually written.
Law Minister Md Asaduzzaman repeatedly insisted that the new transfer was not heba. The amendment expressly says that it does not invalidate, restrict or interfere with heba under Muslim law, an ordinary gift or any other legally recognised method of transferring property.
“This gift is a general gift. It is not heba,” he told Parliament, drawing a line between the new statutory device and transfers governed by Islamic law.
That distinction matters because Bangladesh already operates a plural legal system in which general property law and religious personal law coexist. The existing Transfer of Property Act itself recognises heba under Muhammadan law in its rules governing gifts of immovable property.
Asaduzzaman also argued that the idea of separating ownership of an asset from its usufruct is hardly alien to Muslim jurisprudence. He cited standard works on Mohammedan law and court decisions supporting the proposition that a donor can transfer the corpus of property while reserving a limited right to its income or enjoyment.
Bangladeshi court jurisprudence has itself discussed the distinction between ownership of the corpus and grants involving usufruct under Muslim law. That makes the opposition-government disagreement more complicated than a simple contest between religious law and secular law.
The question however is whether Parliament has successfully built a separate civil-law form of gift without altering the legal consequences of heba and inheritance — or merely created another route by which families can produce substantially similar outcomes.
That distinction will eventually matter more in deeds and courtrooms than it did in Sunday's parliamentary arguments and counter-arguments. There are practical questions, too.
Independent MP Rumin Farhana supported the purpose of the bill but identified one of its vulnerabilities. She proposed that a recipient should not be able, during the donor's lifetime, to mortgage the property to a bank or transfer it to a third party without the donor's written consent. She also sought a mechanism allowing a parent who was subsequently neglected or abused to approach a court to cancel the transfer unilaterally.
Those concerns expose the limits of what a lifetime right of enjoyment can accomplish. The new mechanism gives the donor protection over use. It does not simply leave the donor as owner. Ownership has already moved.
The legislation provides that a registered lifetime-usufruct gift will generally be irreversible, although donor and recipient may jointly alter or revoke it through another registered instrument when genuine financial, medical, educational, family or other needs arise.
If one of them is a minor, missing, mentally incapacitated or otherwise legally incapable, District Judge approval can be sought. But mutual consent is an imperfect remedy for the very family breakdown that the law is designed to address.
A child willing to cooperate with a parent is unlikely to present the hardest case. The difficult case is the child who will not. The amendment therefore solves one problem very clearly and leaves others for future litigation.
It gives an elderly donor something the old statute did not expressly guarantee: a registered proprietary right to remain in, use or enjoy the property after giving away its ownership.
It does not erase the risk of bad family relations. Nor does it return ownership automatically when a relationship collapses.
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