Licence to kill for Tk 7,000

Fake licences claiming lives on streets
How much does it cost to buy a license to kill in Bangladesh? Apparently about Tk seven thousand – the amount needed to obtain a driving license in a country where people are rarely punished for killing on the roads.
“I had never been in the drivers’ seat of a vehicle, but I managed to get a license last year by spending only TK 6,500 with a broker,” a businessman at Dhaka’s Eastern Trade Centre at Kakrail told The Independent, asking that his name not be published.
Last week the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) at Mirpur was asked to examine 750 licenses sent by the district administration of Kishorganj and found that only 70 were genuine.
A source said the figure is likely higher outside the capital.
The number of road accidents in Bangladesh is alarming, with more than 100 deaths per 10,000 registered motor vehicles each year, according to a World Bank report.
In Myanmar and Nepal – whose rates themselves are above international levels – the rate is 47.7 and 62.7 respectively. In developed countries, the annual fatality rate is below three.
Thousands of such licenses are included in the 8 lakh (800,000) issued by the BRTA that are being used by drivers with no professional training.
As of July 2009, 1,270,707 vehicles were registered in Bangladesh, meaning that at least 4 lakh (400,000) vehicles are being operated by drivers who without BRTA-issued licenses. 
Officials say there are three types of fake licenses. The first consists of BRTA licenses issued to drivers that have not passed the examination. The Second type is licenses printed on genuine cards, registered on private contractors’ databases but not in the BRTA paper registers. The final category consists of forged licenses on fake cards and paper.
The BRTA has no figures on the number of licenses issued but top officials estimate that eight lakh (800,000) are in circulation. Of these, the number of plastic licenses is around 490,000, of which 340,000 are issued for professional drivers.
According to the law, anyone wanting to drive a vehicle must have a license. For this he must complete a written examination and pass a field test conducted by a six-member board comprising an inspector from the BRTA who acts as the Member Secretary, a doctor from a medical college, an official from designated polytechnic institute, a police official and an official from and the roads and highways department. The Chief Metropolitan Magistrate or his representative acts as Chairman of the board.
However, in the districts, the board has only four people as they lack a representative from a polytechnic institute or the roads and highways department.
Sources inside the BRTA reveal that the board is authorised to approve the list of persons who pass the test. The draft list is prepared by the member secretary of the board in collaboration with other members and sent to the other members and the chairman of the board for approval.
Board members often fail to cross check the lists after they are submitted.
At the district level, when the list is being approved by the ADM, the senior BRTA official does not dare question the findings, as his rank is lower than the ADM, a senior BRTA official told The Independent.
“Fifty percent of driving licenses are not issued by BRTA,” former Chairman of the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority Sunil Kanti Bose said in a meeting between the Anti-Corruption Commission and senior officials from the Communications Ministry at the ACC headquarters.
According to Professor Md Shamsul Hoque, director of the Accident Research Institute (ARI) of BUET, 50 to 70 percent of driving licenses are fake.
BRTA officials said that political interference was one of the main barriers to cleaning up the process.
Out of the 8 lakh (800,000) licenses, half were issued under pressure from motor workers unions.
He said motor workers unions had demanded license quotas and forced the BRTA to issue licenses to union members. 
BRTA sources said that the companies contracted to prepare plastic licenses had made nearly 150,000 fake licenses by copying the code number and scanning the signatures of real licenses, BRTA sources said.
DMP Commissioner AKM Shahidul Hoque has said they issued a deadline for fake driving-licence holders to obtain licenses by March 31.
“We will go for legal action after the deadline,” he said.
“There are many examples of bus drivers maiming or killing people through callous driving,” said Khandakar Rafiqul Hossain Kajal, president of the Association of Bus Companies (ABC), estimating that 60 percent of licenses are fake. He warned that a crackdown would cause a driver shortage.
GM Siraj, a leader of the motor vehicle owners association noted most taxi drivers come from rural areas and do not know how to obtain a license, encouraging them to go to middleman to obtain fake licenses, he added.
He rejected the possibility of disqualifying rural licenses from the capital. “The district offices are given the authority to issue licenses as a way of decentralizing the authority” he said. But he admitted that in the district BRTA offices the monitoring is very weak and had encouraged the influx of fake licenses.
 
Courtesy of The Independent