It is the last Thursday of the month in Mirpur. A landlord walks flat to flat with a notebook and a cotton bag. One tenant counts out Tk18,000 in worn notes. Another hands over Tk22,000 silently. No receipt, no record, no trace. Over a lakh and a half is collected in under an hour. He has done it for twenty years.
Nobody has ever stopped him. Nobody has ever even tried.
This is not a story about one landlord in Mirpur. It is how Bangladesh loses billions of taka every year — not to offshore shell companies or complex money laundering, but to envelopes passed across doorways in broad daylight, in every city. And yet the state has everything it needs to stop it. It has chosen not to.
Bangladesh ranks last among 37 Asia-Pacific nations in tax-to-GDP ratio according to the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD). At 7.3 per cent in 2023, and projected to fall to 6.7 per cent by FY25, it is far below the regional average of 19.6 per cent.
The World Bank considers 15 per cent the minimum floor for basic development. The problem is not poverty or economic activity — it is visibility. A staggering portion of wealth remains invisible to the state.
Rental income is a major blind spot
Nearly 46 per cent of Dhaka households are renters, with house rent inflation at 5.97 per cent year-on-year in late 2024. Many tenants already spend up to 60 per cent of their income on rent.
This is not a small informal market at the edges. It is a massive, high-velocity economic system — running almost entirely on cash, with no paper trail and no tax consequence. In FY2022, only 1.4 per cent of Bangladeshis filed tax returns, compared with 5.8 per cent in India.
Landlords managing ten, twenty, thirty flats are overwhelmingly absent from that number — not because they are hiding, but because the system never built a light.
It is time to build one. It is called ABAS — Automated Building and Apartment System.
One app, one address
ABAS is a single government-owned, City Corporation-operated platform, built and enforced by the state rather than a private startup chasing valuation. The landlord is the merchant. The renter is the customer. The City Corporation is the platform. Rent moves through a channel the government can see.
Every landlord registers with a verified profile: building address, floors, total units, occupancy, monthly rent per flat. From that day, rent is collected exclusively through the app. No cash. No envelope.
The platform connects to Bangladesh’s mobile financial services (MFS) ecosystem through a government-designated merchant settlement layer. bKash, Nagad and Rocket already carry Tk4,833 crore in daily transactions.
ABAS does not build new infrastructure; it mandates which track rent runs on. Utility payments such as WESA, DESCO and Titas Gas are integrated, while rooftop gardens and solar panels can be logged for tax offsets.
Renters register with their National Identity (NID), select their building and flat, and pay rent through ABAS.
They receive a digital receipt and a verifiable address permanently linked to their identity — proof of residence for jobs, bank accounts, school admissions and healthcare. For millions living in an administrative grey zone, formalisation is not a burden; it is one of the most valuable services the state has ever provided for free.
As of December 2024, MFS accounts exceeded 238 million, with transactions reaching Tk17.37 lakh crore — a 28.42 per cent increase over 2023. Bangladesh processed roughly 8.6 per cent of the world’s daily mobile money transactions last year.
The country is not an aspirational digital economy. It is an operational one. The fintech foundation took a decade to build. It is ready. ABAS simply asks that rent, paid every month by millions, finally passes through a system that counts it.
Security, data and fiscal credibility
ABAS ends the era of ghost tenants. Every renter is NID-verified and linked to a physical address in real time, giving law enforcement and city planners a live occupancy map they never had. This is not surveillance; it is the basic function of urban governance. Dhaka, a city of 25 million people, has been almost entirely blind.
The platform also captures rent levels, occupancy rates and neighbourhood growth patterns, providing the government with the most powerful planning instrument it has ever possessed.
Authorities can see where rents are spiking before families are displaced, where density is exploding before infrastructure fails, and which areas attract doctors or factory workers. Dhaka needs 120,000 new housing units per year, yet only 25–30 per cent of demand is being met. ABAS allows measurement and action.
Fiscal credibility improves as well. The International Monetary Fund (IMF) targets 9.5 per cent tax-to-GDP by FY26, yet the National Board of Revenue (NBR) missed its target by Tk44,000 crore in FY23. ABAS turns every rent payment into a real-time, market-validated property valuation.
No committee, no inspector, no quiet conversation between an assessor and a landlord. The market sets the value; the tax follows automatically.
Why ABAS has not existed before
The MFS rails are not new. The NID is not new. Smartphones are not new. Everything needed to build ABAS has existed for years. Cash-based rent was never just a habit; it was an arrangement between landlords, local power, and a tax system that preferred quiet compliance.
ABAS tears up that contract. Resistance will come not from technology or tenants but from those whose comfort depends on the system staying broken.
The interim government has a rare opportunity. Public demand for accountability is at a generational peak. The country has a battle-tested MFS backbone, a national NID system, the highest smartphone penetration in history, and a generation of young Bangladeshis with no nostalgia for the cotton bag and notebook.
Every landlord, every renter, every taka counted
ABAS is a choice about which systems to build and which arrangements to dismantle. It makes rent transparent, verifiable and taxable. The envelope had its time. Its time is over.
The author is a digital banking and fintech strategist focused on financial inclusion, platform economics and urban innovation.
