No country for old men (or women)

Nearly three months after the death of Nur Jahan Begum provoked a national reckoning over the treatment of the elderly, the government’s grand response is a proposed amendment to property transfer law. That’s essentially a gift-deed clause.

I argued in a piece in Bangla Outlook that Bangladesh had found three individuals to blame and was in danger of missing the systemic point entirely. The outrage over Begum’s death was real, the grief genuine. Yet the national conversation rapidly collapsed into moral condemnation of her adult children while the state watched comfortably from the sidelines. 

The fundamental question remained: what has the government built for its elderly citizens, and what does it actually owe them? We now have an answer of sorts. It is, if anything, more revealing than the silence that preceded it.

On July 30, the Law Minister, Md Asaduzzaman, announced that the government plans to amend the Transfer of Property Act. Under the proposed reform, parents may transfer property to their children while retaining the right to occupy and enjoy it throughout their lifetimes. Neither side could sell the property without mutual consent. The minister framed this as a welfare initiative. In truth, it is a conveyancing amendment dressed up in the language of administrative compassion. 

Faced with 15 million citizens aged 60 and older, the state decided that what they truly need is a better deed.

Start with the institutional confusion. The Department of Social Services, under the Ministry of Social Welfare, holds an explicit mandate to provide services to senior citizens alongside the destitute and marginalized. It has run such programmes since 1961. The welfare ministry is, constitutionally and administratively, the body charged with the well-being of the elderly. It implements the Old Age Allowance and related safety nets designed to build a functioning welfare state.

The law ministry’s job is to manage the legal system, draft legislation, and oversee courts. Property rights and civil litigation fall within its domain; a national strategy for housing and caring for an ageing population absolutely does not. Deploying the law ministry to lead the response to a care crisis is equivalent to asking the shipping ministry to manage a public health emergency. 

The instinct may be well-intentioned, but the institution is wrong. Meanwhile, the Department of Social Services has offered precisely nothing in the weeks since Begum’s death.

What makes this posture indefensible is that Bangladesh does not lack a policy framework. It lacks the administrative will to implement one. In November 2013, the cabinet approved the National Policy on Older Persons, recognizing the elderly as senior citizens in line with United Nations guidelines. 

That policy is now thirteen years old. Academic research repeatedly demonstrates that its promises have never translated into tangible improvements. Put plainly, the policy lies dormant due to a lack of bureaucratic effort.

Furthermore, the National Committee on Ageing, established to coordinate government action on demographic change, has been inactive since the pandemic. Nobody has reconvened it. Nobody, in the wake of a prominent elder-neglect scandal, thought to do so. Bangladesh possesses an ageing policy, an action plan, a welfare ministry with a 60-year history, and a dedicated committee. Not one mechanism was activated. Instead, the government sent the law minister to talk about conveyancing.

The proposed amendment is not entirely useless. Protecting parental rights over transferred property addresses a specific problem: elderly parents who sign over homes under family pressure and end up legally dispossessed. That occurs, and the law should prevent it.

Yet consider what a usufruct clause cannot do. It cannot house an elderly person whose children live in a one-bedroom Dhaka flat. It cannot provide nursing care for someone with dementia whose son works twelve-hour shifts. It cannot offer dignity to an 80-year-old with no property to transfer, whose children cannot physically manage care alongside work. 

It cannot catch those falling through the cracks of the joint-family model, because it is written entirely within the logic of that model. The government views elder care as a family problem with a legal fix. It is a social infrastructure problem requiring a care solution.

The Ministry of Social Welfare must lead with concrete action. First, reconvene the National Committee on Ageing immediately. Demographic trends did not pause for the pandemic. Second, commission an honest audit of the 2013 national policy to identify funding gaps and unfulfilled commitments, then publish the results. 

Third, launch state-subsidised residential care—even a pilot scheme of one facility per division would signal that the state understands the difference between punitive legislation and actual care systems. Fourth, amend the Parents Care Act of 2013, which currently restricts placing parents in care homes. That clause, intended to preserve family ties, makes residential care legally complicated even when families require it. Institutional care should be a dignified choice, not a legal stigma.

Time is short. Bangladesh’s 15 million elderly population will more than double to 36 million by 2050. The families they depend on are becoming smaller, more urban, and financially strained. The law ministry cannot care for your parents; it was never supposed to. The Ministry of Social Welfare can, but it needs a government willing to direct it. The debate Bangladesh needs today is not about property. It is about people.

—

Adil Mahmood is a former journalist and a public policy observer