Home Rush
Launches, trains too overcrowded
The three ran towards the train station as if their lives depended on reaching there. The father led the race with several bags in each hand, followed by his 17-year-old daughter who kept glancing back towards her mother. The mother was having a hard time keeping up with the pace.
By the time Abdul Kalam and his family reached the Kamalapur Railway Station at 10:00am yesterday, their train — the Dinajpur- bound Ekata express — was supposed to be gone.
But the three, sweating and panting from the heavy lifting and the sprint, learnt that the train had not yet arrived. The 9:50am train finally arrived around 11:30am.
Between 9:30am and 3:30pm, these correspondents found four trains being late by an hour to two and a half hours.
However, those left the station were packed with people, many on rooftops. According to the railway sources, 24 trains left the station with some 25,000 passengers yesterday.
With almost all the tickets already sold out, may had to struggle to manage one. A few left were being sold at an unusually high price, passengers alleged.
Scenes at the Sadarghat Launch Terminal were not much different. Most of the 60 launches that left the terminal had hundreds of passengers, many of them women and children, travelling on the rooftops.
The government rules bar carrying passengers on the roof but no launch owners are paying any heed to that.
Risking their lives, hundreds took dinghies to board the launches before the vessels reached the terminal.
A workers’ syndicate known as “Chador Bahini” allegedly occupied the spaces in the deck and sold those at a high price.
“There is no room to sit; most of the deck has been occupied by them [Chador Bahini]. I have bought around five square feet of space at Tk 300,” said Subir Roy, a passenger of Glory of Sreenagar-3.
Many also complained that terminal workers forcibly took their baggage and carried those to the launches and charged them additional fares.
Senior deputy director of Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA), however, denied the allegation of workers harassing the passengers.
Officials at the terminal said the number of people travelling by waterways is much higher compared to the previous years. Almost all the roads leading to the terminal was clogged with vehicles.
Meanwhile, traffic situation on many highways improved yesterday except for the Dhaka-Mymensingh road.
Our Manikganj correspondent reported that no long tailback was seen on the Dhaka-Aricha highway and even an otherwise congested Paturia ferry terminal.
Bus owners said the situation improved due to the sunny weather.
Still, many busses were late. Bus owners said a disruption of ferry movement at Mawa and transport strike by workers in Rangpur caused some delay.
Almost all the bus services were charging extra fares, passengers said.
Courtesy of The Daily Star
