Illegal toll from essentials-carrying trucks to be checked: Minister

Commerce Minister Faruk Khan said yesterday that strong regulatory measures would be taken to check illegal toll collection from the trucks transporting essential commodities.
The minister was speaking at a seminar in Dhaka.
International Finance Corporation (IFC), a private sector arm of the World Bank, in collaboration with Unnayan Samunnay, a local development think tank, organised the seminar on Enhancing Competition in the Bangladesh Economy, where two study findings were released.
Pointing his finger at the permission of reconditioned truck imports that was sought by traders, Khan said, “Our present import policy does not support such imports of reconditioned truck from India, although the proposal reflects the high demand for the vehicle.”
The minister agreed to the issues revealed by the two studies on Edible Oil and Trucking Sectors that illegal toll collection and transport agency cartel cause higher cost of doing business.
The studies found that close political, business and family links determine the entry of new players in the business, leading to concentration of services among small number of players and growing practice of anti-competitiveness.
The studies were jointly carried out by the Bangladesh Investment Climate Fund of IFC and Unnayan Samunnay.
The studies recommended among other things that the market structure for imported essentials should be examined in order to establish whether any of them are actually cartelised, or why there are so few suppliers in some markets.
It was also suggested that the government could be spared from unnecessary efforts to control the market.