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Transports operators fleece passengers

They realise Tk 182 cr a day illegally


Published : 13 Sep 2022 10:14 PM

Public transport owners and their workers in Dhaka are forcing passengers to pay an additional Tk182.42 crore illegally on some 3.5 crore road trips on average every day. 

Many travelers are often harassed, humiliated and even killed if they protest.

Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity (JKS) in a discussion meeting yesterday (Tuesday) made the above claims following a recent survey. The discussion meeting was titled, 'We want effective action to stop the anarchy of collecting excess fare'. The welfare association organised the event marking the 4th Passenger Rights Day at National Press Club in Dhaka on Tuesday.

Speakers at the event alleged that due to such a spree of collecting extra fares from passengers the country is seeing an alarming rise in social unrest, rise in commodity prices, and crime rates.

Mozammel Haque Chowdhury, Secretary General of JKS has brought the allegations of charging extra fares from passengers in all modes of public transport in the discussion meeting.

He said, "Fuel prices have been increased twice in the past year. Following which fares for different modes of public transport were hiked at an unusual rate. This has made the transport sector costly. None of the city transport owners comply the fixed fares set by the government."

“When passengers decided to protest such irregularities, 25 of them were humiliated, 14 were thrown out of the buses and killed while 10 others were seriously injured,” Mozammel Haque Chowdhury added.

The Secretary General said that JKS conducted a series of surveys in public transports to reveal the fare anarchy in the capital from August 20 to September 3. It has been noticed that most of the transports realize double to even triple the fare fixed by the government which is illegal.

Mozammel Haque further said, “We spoked to many drivers, assistants and fare collectors to know the reasons for the illegal hike in transport fares. Majorities of the staff workers said that they are forced to realize high rates of fares from the passengers as they are compelled to deposit a fixed amount at the end of each day to their transport owners as agreed prior to ‘hiring’ the vehicle.”

He explained that emergency vehicle repair works, high cost of fuel, extorsion on the roads and daily expenses on paying toll money to law enforcing agencies are big burdens of daily expenses. Such additional costs of running road trips require additional costs which the transport workers said that they are obliged to realize as ‘extra fares’ from passengers. 

He also said that even though there is a law to fix the fare of ‘human hauler,’ since the government does not fix the fare, the low-income passengers are always charged double-triple fare. Passengers are forced to pay an additional fare of up to taka eight per trip. As a result, passengers have to pay around 6.40 crore additional fare per day only in human hauler.

The public transport workers also pointed out that there are other modes of public transport which are their main competitors. About 5 lakh ridesharing motorcycles, private cars, taxi cabs are carrying roughly 2 crore 16 lakh 40 thousand passengers on an average daily. 

JKS made some recommendations to mitigate the ongoing transport sector crisis include -- a complete reform of the public transport sector; introduction of cashless digital fare collection system; revision of all transport fares; and up to Tk2 lakh fine against transport owners, and staffers for charging passengers extra fares.