Unprofitable BRTC

It is unthinkable that 1,018 out of 1,539 buses of Bangladesh Road and Transport Corporation (BRTC) earned Tk 226.93 crore in profit while Tk 220.36 crore was spent for operation and maintenance, even more so when one considers the price of each of the buses. That left a net profit of Tk 6.57 crore for BRTC in the current fiscal! We are horrified to see that the organisation has become overstaffed where a tenth of the 3,000 BRTC employees contribute nothing due to age factors and the ratio of unproductive staff is unusually high. Moreover, keeping the service operational becomes unprofitable due to high fuel costs. 

Why do BRTC buses require so much repair work? One does not get the impression that any of the buses goes through periodical maintenance or repair looking at their ramshackle condition. Hence we must ask the question whether it is more profitable to run up repair bills than keep the buses on the roads. If fuel costs are too high, why not convert these buses to run on CNG? The second question is why there is no government oversight on the disproportionately large number of non-performing staff on the payroll? This of course is not acceptable. BRTC staff cannot be sitting idle while drawing monthly pay checks that add to high operational costs.

All this points to inefficiency at every stage of the management; it smacks of organised graft being orchestrated by a section of the management simply because the government's anti graft body has not bothered to take a closer look at the systemic problems BRTC is suffering from.