2 Taka, Government of Bangladesh

Unlike the larger denominations, the 1- and 2-taka notes of Bangladesh are government notes, issued directly by the Ministry of Finance and signed not by the Governor of Bangladesh Bank but by the Finance Secretary — a distinction inherited from the colonial and Pakistani-era practice of small-value state notes. The 2-taka has carried this nationalist design since 2011; the issue catalogued here bears the signature of Finance Secretary Fazle Kabir, who signed the 2013 printing before later becoming Governor of the central bank.

The face pairs the portrait of Bangabandhu Sheikh Mujibur Rahman — the independence leader and founding father of the nation — with the Jatiyo Smriti Soudho, the National Martyrs' Memorial at Savar, Syed Mainul Hossain's folded concrete spires raised to those who died in the 1971 Liberation War. The reverse shows the Shaheed Minar in Dhaka, the monument to the students killed in the 1952 Language Movement, when Bengalis fought for the right to their own tongue. The two monuments set the nation's two founding struggles — language and independence — on a single small note.