Lottery Tickets and Lottery Luck: France's Heritage Funding Experiment
In 2018, France launched one of the world's most unusual cultural financing experiments: a national heritage lottery, the Loto du Patrimoine, designed to fund the restoration of endangered historical monuments. The concept was simple — citizens buy scratch cards or draw tickets through the French national lottery operator Française des Jeux, a portion of proceeds flows to the Fondation du Patrimoine (Heritage Foundation), and the funds are distributed to imperilled sites across the country. By 2024, the initiative had raised over 155 million euros since inception, with proceeds distributed to approximately 950 sites. Each year, 18 emblematic endangered monuments receive priority funding — featured on the lottery cards themselves — while a further 100 departmental projects receive smaller grants. The programme's architect, popular television presenter Stéphane Bern, modelled it partly on a similar initiative in the United Kingdom and has since become France's most prominent heritage advocate, using the lottery's media platform to highlight the quiet deterioration of monuments most tourists never see.
The French approach is instructive not because every country should run a heritage lottery, but because it reveals a recognition that is increasingly shared across the world: heritage preservation is chronically underfunded relative to its cultural, economic, and national identity value, and solving that funding gap requires institutional creativity and public engagement, not simply larger line items in a culture ministry budget. France's national restoration budget of €326 million annually — substantial by any measure — was itself acknowledged as insufficient. The lottery supplements it with both funds and public visibility, turning heritage into a participatory project rather than an elite institutional concern.
For Bangladesh, a country with two UNESCO World Heritage Sites, a tentative list of additional candidates, and archaeological evidence of continuous civilisation stretching back over two millennia — all managed by institutions operating under significant resource, capacity, and governance constraints — the questions France's lottery experiment raises are directly relevant: what is Bangladesh's cultural heritage worth, how is it funded, and what does protecting it require?
What Bangladesh Has: A Heritage of Unusual Depth and Diversity
Bangladesh's cultural heritage is frequently underestimated, including domestically. The country's geography — the delta formed by the confluence of the Ganges, Brahmaputra, and Meghna — has shaped a civilisation of remarkable continuity and complexity. Archaeological evidence at Mahasthangarh in Bogura, considered the oldest known archaeological site in Bangladesh, dates to approximately the 3rd century BCE. The Mauryan Empire's presence is attested there by an inscribed stone edict. Successive civilisations — Mauryan, Gupta, Pala, Sena, Sultanate, Mughal, and British colonial — left layered material records across the territory of present-day Bangladesh, producing a heritage that is simultaneously Buddhist, Hindu, Islamic, and colonial in its diversity.
Bangladesh's two UNESCO World Heritage Sites represent different periods of this layered history. The Ruins of the Buddhist Vihara at Paharpur — Somapura Mahavihara — designated in 1985, is the largest Buddhist monastery south of the Himalayas, dating to the 8th century CE during the Pala Dynasty under Emperor Dharmapala. Spanning over 27 acres with a cruciform central shrine and 177 monk cells, it was for nearly three centuries one of the great centres of Buddhist learning and attracted scholars from across South and Southeast Asia. The Historic Mosque City of Bagerhat — designated the same year — is a 15th-century city founded by the Turkish general Ulugh Khan Jahan and containing over 50 Islamic monuments, including the iconic Shat Gombuj (Sixty Dome) Mosque. Forbes has listed Bagerhat among the world's 15 lost cities, and its monuments — most recovered by removing centuries of encroaching vegetation — represent one of the most remarkable surviving ensembles of Sultanate-era Islamic architecture in South Asia.
Beyond the UNESCO sites, Bangladesh's archaeological landscape includes Mainamati in Comilla — a Buddhist complex spanning the 7th to 13th centuries with over 50 identified sites including viharas, stupas, and temples; Mahasthangarh and its associated Gokul Medh complex; Panam Nagar in Sonargaon, the abandoned colonial-era merchant city that was once the capital of the Bengal Sultanate and is on Bangladesh's Department of Archaeology's protected list; and the Kantaji Temple in Dinajpur, a Hindu terracotta temple of exceptional craftsmanship. Bangladesh has submitted tentative nominations to UNESCO for the Archaeological Sites on the Deltaic Landscape of Bangladesh — a series of sites reflecting 7th to 19th-century CE occupation in the Sundarbans region — and the Architectural Works of Muzharul Islam, which would recognise 20th-century modernist architectural heritage of regional significance.
The Preservation Gap: What Bangladesh Faces
The gap between Bangladesh's heritage wealth and its heritage protection capacity is stark. A 2025 peer-reviewed study published in the Journal of Emerging Technologies and Innovative Research (JETIR) documented the crisis at the Bangladesh National Museum (BNM) in Dhaka — the country's largest repository of cultural heritage. The museum holds over 93,932 antiquities. It can display approximately 5 percent of them. The remaining 90,089 antiquities are confined to storage facilities constructed over four decades ago that lack modern climate control, humidity regulation, and scientific storage infrastructure. The museum's warehouses are deteriorating, and the delayed construction of a new museum building — initially proposed in 2018 — has prolonged this situation without resolution. Bangladesh, the study noted, lacks a dedicated national institution for conservation science, unlike peer countries with specialised training programmes.
At the site level, similar challenges persist. A UNESCO-supported project active in 2024-25 specifically targeting Paharpur and Bagerhat identified "critical gaps" in both locations despite previous interventions: technical capacity deficiencies in museum management, absence of professional on-site management and monitoring, and low visibility of the sites among children and youth — a generational engagement problem with long-term implications for preservation advocacy. As of September 2025, Bangladesh does not have a complete official national list of heritage sites. The Department of Archaeology maintains a national register of protected monuments, but the register is acknowledged as incomplete. The Urban Study Group, an independent conservation initiative, has claimed that Dhaka alone contains over 2,200 heritage sites — a figure vastly larger than what official registers currently capture.
The threats Bangladesh's heritage faces are compounded by factors that France does not contend with at comparable scale: climate change and flooding in the delta landscape that physically threatens sites, particularly in the low-lying areas of the Sundarbans region where archaeological sites within the mangrove forest are subject to regular inundation, erosion, and river course change; rapid and poorly regulated urbanisation that has destroyed or compromised heritage structures in Dhaka and other cities; and political instability episodes that have directly endangered cultural institutions. The International Council of Museums (ICOM) issued an urgent call in 2024-25 specifically addressing destruction threats to Bangladesh's museums, historical documents, and archaeological sites during periods of political crisis — noting damage that threatened the physical existence of cultural institutions recognised internationally as repositories of national identity.
The Antiquities Act and Legal Framework: Foundations and Limits
Bangladesh's legal heritage protection framework centres on the Antiquities Act 1968, inherited from the pre-independence Pakistani legal structure and subsequently amended. The Act establishes the Department of Archaeology as the primary regulatory body, empowers the government to declare sites as protected monuments, restricts excavation to licensed archaeologists, and prohibits the export of antiquities without authorisation. The framework is conceptually sound but faces implementation challenges common to heritage legislation in developing country contexts: limited enforcement capacity relative to the number of sites requiring protection, inadequate resources for systematic monitoring, and insufficient penalties relative to the economic incentives driving illicit antiquity trade.
Bangladesh's listing as an OIC member and its participation in international heritage frameworks — including UNESCO conventions — provides external architecture for protection standards, but translating international commitments into domestic institutional performance requires exactly the technical capacity, funding, and governance structures that remain underdeveloped. The BTRC analogy is apt here too: a regulatory framework exists, but the institutions implementing it have accumulated layers of inadequacy that require systematic reform, not just periodic enforcement action.
One specific governance gap identified by the Wikipedia documentation of heritage listings as of September 2025 is particularly revealing: Bangladesh has no official, comprehensive national heritage list. The incomplete nature of the protected monuments register means that structures of significant heritage value have no formal protection status — they can be demolished by developers without legal remedy. Dhaka's Urban Study Group estimate of 2,200 heritage sites against a fragmentary official register represents the scale of this documentation gap. In this context, even the minimal protection that legal designation provides is unavailable for the majority of the country's heritage buildings.
What Bangladesh Can Learn: Finance, Digitisation, and Community Engagement
France's Loto du Patrimoine is one model among several that Bangladesh's policymakers could draw lessons from — not as a direct import, but as evidence of what creative institutional design applied to a genuine public good can produce. The lottery's success depended on three elements that are transferable in principle: a funding mechanism that draws on popular participation rather than relying solely on government appropriations; media and public engagement that makes heritage preservation a matter of broad civic pride rather than specialist concern; and a transparent grant process that distributes funds to named projects with measurable outcomes, creating public accountability for how the money is used. The UK's National Lottery Heritage Fund — the model Bern drew on — has since 1994 distributed over £9 billion to heritage projects across Britain, supporting thousands of sites at every scale from village churches to national museums. These models work because they align financial incentives with genuine public engagement with heritage as a shared asset.
Bangladesh is beginning to explore digitisation as a complementary preservation tool. Archaeological sites and monuments are being recorded with drones and 3D modelling, enabling more accurate planning for conservation interventions. Historical manuscripts, rare books, and artworks are being scanned and catalogued into digital repositories. Museums and libraries are beginning digitisation initiatives that create permanent records of collections that deteriorating physical storage conditions put at risk. Digital mapping and virtual tours make sites accessible beyond their physical locations, enabling heritage education and international awareness for sites that receive limited visitor traffic. These are genuine advances, but they remain early-stage relative to the scale of what needs to be documented and the pace at which unprotected heritage continues to degrade.
Community engagement is perhaps the most underdeveloped dimension of Bangladesh's heritage protection framework. France's lottery succeeded partly because it made preservation personally meaningful to citizens who bought tickets, watched television coverage, and developed proprietary pride in specific sites. Bangladesh's heritage institutions — the Department of Archaeology, the Bangladesh National Museum, the Islamic Foundation's preservation activities — have operated primarily as government technical bodies rather than as public-facing advocates building mass constituencies for heritage protection. The UNESCO-supported project at Paharpur and Bagerhat's specific focus on social media campaigns aimed at children and youth reflects awareness of this gap. Building the next generation of heritage advocates requires making Bangladesh's archaeological and architectural history visible, accessible, and emotionally resonant in ways that school textbooks and museum visits alone have not achieved.
Heritage as National Identity and Economic Asset
Bangladesh's heritage carries meaning that goes beyond the intrinsic value of historical continuity. The 1971 Liberation War itself was fought partly over cultural identity — the suppression of Bengali language and culture by West Pakistan was one of the foundational grievances that mobilised the independence movement. The country's constitution recognises this: preserving the country's distinctive culture and heritage is embedded in Bangladesh's national self-understanding in a way that makes heritage protection not merely a technical conservation matter but an expression of national sovereignty. The Arabic edict at Mahasthangarh, the Buddhist viharas of Paharpur, the Islamic monuments of Bagerhat, the colonial merchant houses of Panam Nagar — together they constitute the material record of a territory that has been, across millennia, a meeting point of South Asian civilisations, faiths, and cultures. Preserving that record is preserving Bangladesh's own answer to the question of who it is.
There is also a direct economic dimension. Heritage tourism, where it functions well, generates foreign exchange, supports local employment, creates demand for hospitality and service infrastructure, and builds the international brand recognition that attracts broader tourism investment. Bagerhat and Paharpur receive a fraction of the international visitors that comparable UNESCO sites in India, Thailand, or Cambodia attract — not because the sites are less impressive, but because Bangladesh's heritage tourism infrastructure, international marketing, and site management are underdeveloped relative to their potential. Panam Nagar, with 52 abandoned colonial merchant houses on a single street in varying states of photogenic decay, is exactly the kind of atmospheric heritage site that attracts the experiential traveller demographic that drives premium heritage tourism globally. It is largely unknown outside Bangladesh.
France spent €326 million annually on heritage restoration before launching its lottery — and still found the budget insufficient. Bangladesh's heritage protection budget is a fraction of that figure applied to a comparable breadth of challenge. The gap is not closeable by budget allocation alone. It requires the institutional reform, capacity building, community engagement, and creative financing mechanisms that France's lottery exemplifies — adapted to Bangladesh's context, constraints, and cultural specificity. The first step is completing the national heritage register that as of September 2025 remains unfinished — because you cannot protect what you have not formally recognised as worth protecting.
win-tk.org is a wintk publication covering global and regional affairs with a focus on Bangladesh and South Asia.
