Bangladesh Budgets $748M for World Bank-Backed One-ID Digital Identity System

Bangladesh has detailed plans for its One-ID digital identity platform, a $748 million World Bank-backed initiative issuing roughly 200 million biometric chip cards linked to a smartphone digital wallet for taxes, subsidies, payments and government services. The project fuses physical and digital credentials into one government-controlled biometric profile, following models from Estonia, Singapore and India. Such integrated identity-payment infrastructure, built at national scale, shows how the technical backbone for controlling access to goods and services through a single system is being constructed worldwide.