Bangladesh Road Transport Authority’s attempt to outsource vehicle fitness tests to private motor repair workshops has been delayed following demands
from a private motor workshop owners’ association about how repair workshops should be registered with the BRTA.
In March 2011, new rules were framed under the Motor Vehicles Ordinance 1983 requiring that all businesses who wished to repair motor vehicles should obtain registration.
The owners’ association has demanded that only those workshops which were members of the association should get registered and that the selection committee should include two of its members.
The communications ministry, however, has refused both demands of the owners’ association.
In February and March 2012, the BRTA ran two advertisements asking that workshops obtain registration since it had plans to outsource the vehicle fitness examination to private businesses by the end of the year.
BRTA officials said at that time that once they had registered 10 to 12 workshops, their teams would start considering whether these businesses were capable of examining the fitness of vehicles on behalf of the authority. If the system worked, they said, BRTA would then hope to expand the process to the rest of the country.
The authority’s engineering department director Mohammad Saiful Hoque told New Age that about 10 workshops including Navana Limited, Rangs Workshop Limited, and Rahimafrooz (Bangladesh) Limited, had so far applied for registration to operate all over the country.
With the publication of the advertisements, the Bangladesh Automobile Workshop Malik Samity set out their demands.
BRTA agreed to one but not the others.
In a letter dated November 18, 2012, the chairman of BRTA Md. Ayubur Rahman Khan wrote to the communication ministry proposing that the Motor Vehicles rules should be amended so that the selection committee, which currently only comprises government officials, should include two BAWMS members.
However, the chairman rejected the demand that only those workshops that were members of the association should be registered. The letter stated, ‘[I]t was a personal matter of each private motor workshop about whether it would become a member of the association or not. This matter should not be made mandatory by including it in the Motor Vehicle Ordinance 1983.’
In March this year, the communication ministry’s deputy secretary Chandan Kumar Dey wrote to BRTA rejecting its proposal to amend the rules.
BRTA’s Director Saiful told New Age that as a result of the demands from the owners’ association the registration process had been stopped and that they had yet to take any decision about when they would start scrutinising the applicant workshops’ competence.
‘We just got the ministry’s reply,’ he said.
The association president, Mohammad Belayet Hossain, told New Age that any decision made by communication ministry not to amend the rules was inconsistent with a July 1, 2009 order of the commerce ministry that required all motor workshops should become members of the owners’ association.
‘If the authority does not meet our demands we will meet the communications minister and then commerce minister,’ Belayet said. ‘If these meetings do not bring any positive result we will go to court.’
According to the association, there are about 20,000 to 25,000 motor workshops all over the country with 3,000 registered with the association, 1,000 of which in Dhaka.
BRTA only has two centres in the capital — at Mirpur 10 and at Ekuria in Keraniganj — to check the fitness of about seven lakh motor vehicles in Dhaka. The total number of motor vehicles in the country is about 17.5 lakh.
Five automatic vehicle inspection centres, which the BRTA opened in 1999 under a joint road maintenance and rehabilitation project with Danish International Development Agency, have remained inoperative since they were established because of problems with the software.
Experts were divided about the BRTA’s plan to outsource vehicle maintenance inspection.
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology civil engineering department professor Mohammad Shamsul Haque said that outsourcing was needed as there was corruption in the BRTA’s present fitness checking service.
Whilst acknowledging there ‘could also be corruption in the BRTA’s new initiative,’ he said that ‘we have to go forward with this outsourcing initiative to improve the present situation in the sector.’
The professor said that the outsourcing initiative would lessen the pressure from the transport authority while the government had to have a strong monitoring system over the selected workshops.
Maruf Rahman, national advocacy officer of Work for Better Bangladesh Trust, a non-government organisation working with transport systems was more critical of the idea.
‘Fitness examination of vehicles is a very important task as national security and environment-related issues are directly linked to it,’ he said. ‘It will be tough to monitor the private workshops’ performance and chances of corruption and complexity will also increase.’ (Source)
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