Far too many rickshaws

At any given point in time, unlicensed rickshaws must be outstripping authorised ones by a ratio of at least 3 to 1. But now, well into the month of Ramadan, and with the Eid a fortnight or so away, rural drifters among the poorest of poor are filing into Dhaka city in quest of a job on the manual three wheeler. It is thus that the current ratio between legal and illegal rickshaws must easily be 4:1, if not more.

There are 79,616 legally licensed rickshaws in the city, whereas when challenged, any of the 3 to 4 lakh unauthorised rickshawpullers will be able to show some licence plates or papers on demand, all of which obviously are fake. The Daily Star a few years ago ran a series of investigative stories revealing that licence plates were being issued and auctioned out to any comer, not by a single authority but by multiple associations and quarters with a finger on the pie. The rackets are politically connected; and, it's only when things go too far that scores of illegally operating rickshaws will be hauled up by the police on to requisitioned trucks to be eventually dumped somewhere. There will be some deterrent effect on their unauthorised plying but as soon as the dusts settled the unlicensed rickshaws will reappear with vengeance and in an inflated strength, the police by and large turning a blind eye.

Making a mockery of any regulatory effort on the part of the traffic police authority, even the so-called rickshaw-free streets are swarming with the manual three-wheelers. Who must account for this?

The whole system of licensing is rotten to the core and unless it is thoroughly overhauled with a clear-cut stipulation about the allowable number of rickshaws, they will just proliferate like locusts bringing public mobility to a virtual halt. The big need is for a single oversight and enforcement authority to take the place of a non-governing entity.