The chairman of the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority has warned the High Court that the road transport system would become ‘paralysed’, causing a ‘total collapse’ of the food and essentials supply chain, if it decided to cancel the tens of thousands of driving licences that the authority admits it has given ‘on easy terms’ in violation of the normal legal process.
Md Ayuber Rahman Khan’s stark warning of ‘heavy chaos’ comes at the end of an affidavit in which he admits for the first time that in 2009 the BRTA issued about 10,000 driving licences to lorry drivers on ‘easy terms’, a practice that it now says has been taking place for at least nine years.
The admissions are contained in an affidavit the chairman filed on Sunday in the High Court in response to a public interest writ petition filed by the Bangladesh Legal Aid and Services Trust, Bangladesh Environmental Lawyers Association, Bangladesh Bar Council’s Legal Aid and Human Rights Committee’s chairman ZI Khan, and Supreme Court lawyer Abantee Nurul.
The writ was filed in August in the wake of the death of award-winning filmmaker Tareque Masud and cameraman Ashfaque Munier on 13 August and the death of 40 schoolchildren in a road accident at Mirersarai in Chittagong a month earlier.
The court of Justice Mirza Hussain Haider and Justice Anwarul Haque had asked the BRTA to respond to a report published in August in the daily Prothom Alo, alleging that pressure from shipping minister Shahjahan Khan had resulted in BRTA issuing 10,000 driving licences to road transport workers without ensuring that the legal requirements had been met, and that similar requests had been made for a further 24,000 licences.
In his affidavit to the court, the BRTA’s chairman admitted that 10,000 licences were issued in this way. ‘A list of around 24,000 applications for driving licences from Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation was submitted to BRTA for issuance… on relaxed conditions,’ he added.
With regard to the applications, he however states, ‘No action has been taken by the Road Division, Ministry of Communications or BRTA.’
The shipping minister, Shajahan Khan, is the executive president of the Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation.
The BRTA’s chairman states in his affidavit that this practice of giving licences on ‘easy terms’ goes back to a Memorandum of Understanding signed on 20 August, 2003 between the then BNP communications minister Nazmul Huda and the Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Oikko Parishad, in order to bring to an end indefinite transport strike that was then taking place in the northern and south-western parts of Bangladesh.
The Memorandum of Understanding, annexed to BRTA’s report to the court, suggests that all that was necessary for a worker to get a licence was a letter from his union attesting to his skill.
‘Necessary measures will be taken to provide licences on easy terms through the testing board to drivers having certificates of skill from the president or general secretary of the concerned workers union and attested to by the central and concerned regional committee of the road transport workers federation,’ says the MoU.
In effect, this meant that drivers under 18 years of age, unable to read or write, and without undergoing a proper driving proficiency test, were able to get licences from the driving competency test boards run by the BRTA.
When contacted, Nazmul Huda, the originator of this practice according to the current chairman of the BRTA, said that he did not want to comment on this issue now. ‘’I will talk to you later.’
Following the filing of the public interest writ petition, the High Court bench on 25 August directed a number of concerned government authorities to submit by October 17 the details of the number of road accidents and the measures taken to reduce the number of deaths and injuries.
Following their failure to comply with the order, the court asked the government bodies to submit six reports by November 14 along with four others by November 29, warning them that they would be subject to legal action if they failed to submit the reports.
The BRTA’s chairman, however, denies some of the allegations made in Prothom Alo’s report.
He said that no decision was taken at a meeting of the National Road Safety Council in early 2011 ‘to issue “24,500 driving licences” to professional drivers without making them undergo proper tests and exams’, as the newspaper suggested, and claims that at no stage of the meeting was ‘extortion in the [the] transport sector’ discussed.
The affidavit claimed that the BRTA was doing its best to reduce road accidents and in 2010/11 had provided training to 18,000 professional drivers in 88 batches, had organised 73 awareness seminars and workshops throughout the country and distributed 52,000 leaflets and 10,000 posters to raise public awareness.
It also stated that it had regularly organised mobile courts and that in a 14-month period, between August 2009 and October 2011, had filed 19,791 cases under the Motor Vehicle Ordinance 1983, resulting in fines of over 1.69 crore.
In an annex to affidavit, a BRTA report said that in line with Rule 6 of the Motor Vehicles Rules 1984, in each district and metropolitan area there is a competency test board consisting of members of the district administration and police to conduct road-driving tests, and the BRTA issues driving licences on the basis of the recommendations of the board.
‘Fake licences are available but the BRTA is not at all involved in the racket,’ claimed the authorities in the report.
The report said that the BRTA was following Section 3 of the Motor Vehicles Ordinance 1918 in issuing learner driving licences to some people before they took driving competency tests.
It also said that the BRTA followed Rule 10 of the Motor Vehicles Rules 1984 which says, ‘A person shall not be eligible for holding a driving licence under the Ordinance if he does not know how to read and write either in Bengali or English.’
The BRTA dismissed media reports that it does not follow the age-limit of 18 years for issuing driving licences.
The report also stated that according to information obtained from the police in each of the last 12 years, an average of 3,250 people were killed in road accidents and 2,923 suffered injuries, amounting to a total of 39,006 deaths and 35,086 injuries in 50,201 road accidents across the country between 1999 and 2010.
Courtesy of New Age
