Free running battery-run rickshaws

The plying of highly accident-prone battery-driven rickshaws on the streets as reported in this paper is disconcerting. How could such vehicles that the government prohibited more than a year and a half back find a way again into service is the question.
As the report goes, some labour leaders and a number of rickshaw owners' associations in the Mirpur-Pallabi area are operating these improvised transports with some dishonest members of the police looking the other way.
Apart from their inbuilt mechanical flaws making them unfit for roads, these rickshaws are also notorious power-guzzlers. Since before the ban some 2.4 lakh such vehicles were operating across the country and the amount of power they were consuming was about 216 megawatts. That makes this type of transport doubly problematic -- it is risky for passengers and at the same time a drain on our outage-ridden power supply network.
According to a local pro-ruling party labour leader of Mirpur, around 1,500 such transports are plying under the very nose of the police.
Emboldened by police inaction, the number of such unauthorised transport is increasing rapidly. Many workshops have also sprung up in the Mirpur area and are doing a brisk business by constructing these autorickshaws.
Unless immediate steps are taken to clamp down on this unauthorised mode of transport, they will become an added threat to road safety.
The government should look into the illegal manufacture of these wobbly contraptions and exercise the ban on it.