Somewhere in Mirpur tonight, a family is losing their advance deposit to a landlord who will not return their calls. In Mohammadpur, a young woman is being denied a lease because she lives alone. In Chittagong, a tenant just received a rent hike with three days notice and no explanation.
None of these people know that a law exists to protect them. And to be brutally honest, knowing about it would not change a great deal anyway.
Bangladesh enacted the House Rent Control Act in 1991. On paper, the legislation is genuinely thoughtful. It prohibits exploitative rent, bans illegal evictions, caps advance deposits, mandates rent receipts, and penalizes landlords who cut off utilities to harass tenants into leaving.
Thirty five years later, this law might as well be written in invisible ink. The United Nations Human Settlements Program has long established that access to adequate housing is a fundamental human right. Our law, at least in spirit, acknowledges that. Our enforcement mechanisms, however, do not.
The scale of what we are talking about is not trivial. Bangladesh's urban population now approaches 40 percent of the national total, with Dhaka city alone housing over 20 million people, a significant share of whom are renters. The UN projects that 70 percent of the world's population will live in cities by 2050, and Bangladesh is urbanizing at a pace that makes tenancy governance an urgent economic matter, not a courtroom curiosity.
The entire architecture of the 1991 Act depends on one institution: The rent controller. This officer is empowered to determine standard rents, hear complaints, and resolve disputes.
Section 4 of the Act even imagines a three-month resolution window. In practice, the rent controller system is chronically understaffed, largely inaccessible outside major cities, and almost completely unknown to the people it exists to serve.
Ask any ordinary tenant in Mirpur whether they have ever filed a complaint with the rent controller, and you already know the answer.
This is not ignorance alone. Filing a complaint means navigating bureaucracy, potentially hiring a lawyer, and waiting for an uncertain outcome while living under the same roof as a landlord who now knows you reported him.
The World Justice Project's Rule of Law Index consistently places Bangladesh in the lower quartile for civil justice accessibility. That ranking has a very human face, and it lives in a rented apartment.
The advance deposit racket
Section 10 prohibits collecting more than one month's advance rent without the Rent Controller's approval. Walk into any rental negotiation in Dhaka today and you will find three, six, even 12 months demanded as standard.
When tenants vacate, the deposit vanishes into fabricated damage claims. There is no fast remedy. The UN Committee on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights in its General Comment 4 specifically identifies security of tenure as inseparable from the right to adequate housing. We are violating that standard every day, across thousands of transactions, in plain sight.
No paper, no rights
Perhaps the most consequential gap is the complete absence of any legal requirement for a written tenancy agreement.
A verbal handshake and a cash payment constitute a valid tenancy in Bangladesh. When disputes arise, both parties argue from memory. The tenant almost always loses.
Research in the International Journal of Urban and Regional Research has consistently found that informal tenure arrangements are among the most reliable predictors of housing insecurity in rapidly urbanizing economies. We are running that experiment on tens of millions of people.
What real reform actually looks like
The solution does not require reinventing governance. It requires political will. Mandatory written tenancy agreements, backed by a simple government template and a low-cost digital registration system, would address the documentation vacuum immediately.
Mobile financial services are already embedded in Bangladeshi daily life. Linking rent payments to automatic digital receipts through bKash or Nagad would solve the Section 13 compliance failure overnight.
The World Bank's Doing Business researchhas long demonstrated that property rights formalization, even at the rental level, correlates directly with investment and economic growth.
Fast-track rental tribunals with strict time limits, distributed beyond divisional headquarters, would make the law reachable. Government-supported mediation for ordinary disputes would clear backlogs before adjudication is needed.
The penalties under Sections 23 through 27 need updating for inflation. A fine set in 1991 and never revised is not a deterrent. It is an invitation.
And before any of this is the need for public awareness. Sections 19 and 21 of the Act contain extraordinary protections that almost no tenant in Bangladesh has heard of. Rights nobody knows about are not rights. They are decorative text.
The OHCHR's Guiding Principles on Business and Human Rights are unambiguous: States must not only enact protections but make them real and accessible. We enacted ours in 1991. We have not made them real since.
Tenancy reform will not generate headlines. No ribbon-cutting marks the moment a deposit refund law starts working. But the ILO's World Employment and Social Outlook has repeatedly noted that housing security links directly to labour productivity and workforce mobility.
When a worker is terrified of losing their home, they stay in bad jobs and avoid relocating for better opportunities. Our broken tenancy system is not a legal embarrassment alone. It is an economic drag on millions of working people.
The House Rent Control Act, 1991 was a sincere piece of legislation written for a country that no longer exists. Bangladesh today is more urbanized, more economically complex, and home to a rental population that dwarfs what the drafters imagined. The law has not kept pace.
Fixing it will matter, concretely and daily, to tens of millions of people. That is reason enough to treat it as urgent. What we must not do is wait another 35 years and still call it a law.
Nafis Al Sadik is a Corporate Lawyer and Executive (Legal & Compliance) at Summit Communications Limited. Nafis Ehsas Chowdhury works at MM Ispahani Limited.
