Bangladesh is aspiring to become a trillion-dollar economy, an export powerhouse, and a future regional manufacturing hub. Given these ambitions, investing in world-class ports sounds like an obvious step.
But successful nations are rarely defined by how much infrastructure they build. Instead, they are defined by the discipline they bring to the decision making around what to build, when to build it, and at what cost.
That is precisely why the Bay Terminal deserves a fresh, evidence-based reassessment.
If Bangladesh can unlock substantially more capacity from the ports it already has, shouldn't we wring out those gains before committing billions more to another mega-project while our purchasing power is already strained?
That question is no longer theoretical. In 2025, Chittagong Port Authority handled a record 3.409 million TEUs of containers -- including roughly 750,000 empty boxes -- while carrying 92% of Bangladesh's international trade and nearly 98% of its containerized cargo.
For an economy this size, a port carrying that much of the national trade load is not merely infrastructure. It is the country's economic heartbeat.
Yet beneath the headlines about new megaprojects sits a less-told story. Operational assessments suggest that simply modernizing what already exists -- the New Mooring Container Terminal, the Chittagong Container Terminal, the general cargo berths, and a fully utilized Patenga Container Terminal -- could lift annual handling capacity from roughly 34 lakh TEUs to about 46 lakh TEUs according to a study.
That is a nearly 35% increase without building a single new deep-sea terminal -- on its own, roughly equivalent to adding the throughput of a mid-sized port.
The picture becomes more compelling still. Matarbari Deep Sea Port is already under construction, and the completion of its first phase is projected to lift Bangladesh's total container handling capacity to approximately 54 lakh TEUs -- almost a 60% increase over current throughput. Add APM Terminals' new facility and Matarbari's second phase, and overall national capacity could reach around 88 lakh TEUs -- roughly 2.6 times what the country handles today.
These numbers invite an obvious policy question: Should Bangladesh first optimize, modernize, and fully use the capacity it already has -- and the capacity already nearing completion -- before committing to another capital-intensive port expansion?
This is not an argument against development. It is an argument for sequencing it well.
Singapore continuously modernizes its existing terminals while sequencing expansion decades in advance. The Port of Rotterdam invests as heavily in automation, hinterland connectivity, and logistics integration as it does in physical infrastructure.
Busan's competitive edge comes as much from operational productivity as from additional berths. In global port economics, capacity is one variable, productivity is the multiplier.
That distinction matters because of opportunity costs. Bangladesh remains a capital-constrained economy, and every additional billion dollars committed to one project is a billion dollars unavailable for energy security, rail connectivity, inland logistics, climate resilience, education, or healthcare.
Infrastructure planning, in that sense, is an exercise in capital allocation as much as engineering.
This is where the Bay Terminal deserves closer scrutiny. Accommodating larger, deep-draft vessels will require substantial capital dredging, along with recurring maintenance dredging over the life of the project.
One estimate places initial dredging costs at$150-160 million, with annual maintenance potentially reaching $20-25m -- though these figures need independent engineering validation.
For scale, the World Bank has already approved a $650m loan to help finance the breakwater and access-channel dredging alone, a reminder that headline dredging estimates for the project tend to be a floor rather than a ceiling.
These costs are not, by themselves, reasons to abandon the project. They are reasons to make sure every assumption behind it is rigorously tested.
Bangladesh has already learned this lesson once, at Payra. That port's experience shows how sediment dynamics, navigation constraints, and long-term dredging needs can significantly affect operational economics over time.
Bay Terminal is a different project with different engineering characteristics, and the two should not be treated as identical. But Payra is a reminder that a port's success is measured not by its ribbon-cutting ceremony, but by its ability to operate efficiently, sustainably, and economically over the following 30 years.
Encouragingly, reports indicate that the Bay Terminal feasibility assessment is being revisited. That should be welcomed. It is an opportunity to do something Bangladesh has rarely attempted: A comprehensive national port optimization strategy.
Rather than evaluating Bay Terminal in isolation, policy-makers should weigh it against every realistic alternative such as modernizing NCT and CCT, fully utilising Patenga, accelerating Matarbari, improving rail and inland container logistics, expanding automation, and widening private-sector participation.
Only then can the country work out which sequence of investments delivers the highest economic return per taka spent.
The debate, then, is not whether Bangladesh needs the Bay Terminal. It is whether the Bay Terminal should be the next investment or whether smarter, faster, and more cost-effective options can deliver the same economic benefits while preserving scarce public resources.
Nations rarely grow prosperous because they build the biggest infrastructure. They grow prosperous because they build the right infrastructure, at the right time, in the right sequence, with the discipline to question even their most ambitious ideas.
As Bangladesh charts its maritime future, that discipline may prove to be the most valuable investment decision of all.
Ashfaq Zaman is the founder of Dhaka Forum and a strategic international affairs expert.