The city glows at night. Not with the calm, planned illumination of an orderly metropolis, but with a restless, improvised brightness that seems to have negotiated its own existence. Walk through any road in Dhaka after dusk and you will find a parallel city rising on the pavements. It hums with frying oil, flickers with LED bulbs, whirs with blenders, and radiates heat from ovens that seem far too sophisticated for spaces that technically do not exist.
But if one looks a little closer, the light does not stop at the food carts. It extends into the slow, buzzing procession of battery-run rickshaws, affectionately and somewhat ironically nicknamed the Bangla Tesla. They glide through alleys and choke main roads with equal confidence, their quiet motors powered by a system that is anything but silent.
This is not merely a story about street food or transport. It is a story about electricity. And more importantly, it is a story about legitimacy.
Because electricity, unlike hope, is not supposed to appear out of thin air.
Every fan that rotates above a makeshift stall, every oven that bakes pizza beside a drain, every glowing bulb hanging from a bamboo pole raises a question that we have collectively decided not to ask too loudly. The same question follows the endless stream of battery-run rickshaws that now dominate the capital’s roads.
Where does this power come from, and who pays for it?
The official answer does not exist. The unofficial answer is everywhere.
In the language of sociology, what we are witnessing is no longer just an informal economy. It is an informal infrastructure.
The street vendor and the rickshaw driver, two of the most visible figures of urban survival, are now tied together by an invisible grid of electricity that operates beyond regulation but within routine.
Thinkers like Hernando de Soto argued that informality is not chaos but an alternative system of order. But even that framework struggles to explain a system where electricity, a metred and regulated commodity, is simultaneously sold, stolen, subsidized, and silently redistributed across a city.
Consider the scale of this quiet arrangement. The capital now hosts an estimated one million battery-run rickshaws. They cannot be registered with formal authorities, yet they move as if they belong.
They cannot legally draw power, yet they are charged every day. Somewhere between policy and practice, a contradiction has been normalized.
The state, interestingly, has not entirely resisted this contradiction. It has approved thousands of charging stations and even set a tariff for electric vehicle charging that is lower than the highest domestic electricity rate. In theory, this suggests recognition. In practice, it has created a loophole large enough to power a parallel economy.
Because alongside these approved stations, an entire ecosystem of illegal charging points has emerged. Tens of thousands of such points now exist across the city, accompanied by hundreds of garages that double as charging hubs.
These are not hidden operations tucked away in secrecy. They are embedded within neighbourhoods, operating in plain sight, drawing electricity from legal connections and redistributing it through informal arrangements.
The result is both astonishing and predictable.
Each year, thousands of crores of taka circulate within this shadow system of electricity consumption. For garage owners and intermediaries, it is highly profitable. For the state, it is a continuous, unmonitored leakage. For the ordinary citizen, it is an invisible cost folded into an already strained system.
Electricity theft, in this context, is no longer an isolated act. It is a structure.
And like all structures, it redistributes burden with remarkable efficiency.
The loss does not vanish. It travels. It appears in higher tariffs, in system inefficiencies, in the quiet frustration of households that try to conserve electricity while unknowingly subsidizing a system that does not acknowledge them.
Yet the moral conversation refuses to settle.
There is a certain defensiveness that emerges whenever this issue is raised. The argument arrives quickly and with emotional force. These are poor people trying to survive. They are not criminals. They are not stealing out of greed but out of necessity.
This is where the discussion becomes uncomfortable.
Because it forces us to confront a philosophical dilemma that has troubled thinkers from Aristotle to John Rawls.
Is an act justified if it is necessary for survival, even when it violates the rules that hold society together?
Aristotle might remind us that justice is about proportional fairness, not emotional justification. Rawls might ask whether we would design a system where rules could be selectively ignored based on circumstance.
But Dhaka does not operate in the realm of theoretical philosophy. It operates in the realm of negotiated reality.
The street vendor does not connect his own electricity line. The rickshaw driver does not build his own charging station. Both depend on networks that are organized, protected, and monetized.
Electricity does not reach them accidentally. It is facilitated through layers of intermediaries who ensure continuity in exchange for rent that is neither legal nor entirely hidden.
This is where the narrative of pure innocence begins to fracture.
The vendor may be struggling. The rickshaw driver may be navigating survival. But the system that enables both is not struggling at all. It is efficient, adaptive, and deeply entrenched.
In this sense, the pavement and the charging hub become extensions of the same phenomenon.
One sells food under a light that should not exist. The other powers a vehicle that should not be there.
Both rely on electricity that is simultaneously legal and illegal, visible and invisible.
Michel Foucault might see in this a form of dispersed power. Authority is not absent but diffused through networks that operate beneath formal structures. The state is present, but selectively so. It enforces where it can, withdraws where it must, and negotiates where it benefits.
The citizen, meanwhile, learns quickly.
The lesson is simple. Legality is not a fixed condition. It is a flexible arrangement. The pavement vendor bends it out of necessity. The charging hub exploits it for profit. The enforcement agency navigates it with selective urgency.
Over time, this flexibility becomes a moral habit.
We begin to rationalize contradictions. We criticize congestion while relying on the very rickshaws that cause it. We condemn illegal electricity while enjoying the affordability it indirectly sustains. We speak of discipline but practice accommodation.
The result is a peculiar kind of collective schizophrenia.
Battery-run rickshaws now clog not just the narrow alleys but major roads, contributing to congestion and accidents that increasingly frustrate the very citizens who depend on them.
The absence of an effective public transport system has made these vehicles indispensable. Their unregulated growth has made them intolerable.
This duality is not accidental. It is structural.
Émile Durkheim might describe this as a state of anomie, where norms lose their clarity and society drifts without a shared moral compass. Rules exist, but their meaning erodes when they are applied inconsistently. What remains is not order, but a negotiated coexistence of contradictions.
The introduction of phrases like mutual understanding only deepens the ambiguity. It sounds civil, even compassionate.
But in practice, it often means the quiet acceptance of systemic disorder. It is less a principle than a resignation.
And yet, it would be too simplistic to frame this as a battle between legality and survival.
The street vendor and the rickshaw driver are not the architects of this system. They are its most visible participants.
The real issue lies in the absence of a framework that can integrate these livelihoods into a coherent urban design.
When illegality becomes normal, it does not remain confined to pavements or charging stations. It seeps into institutions, into governance, into the very idea of citizenship. It reshapes expectations. It lowers standards. It redefines what is acceptable.
The question is not whether these systems should exist. They already do. The question is whether they can be transformed into something that does not rely on quiet illegality to function.
HM Nazmul Alam is an academic, journalist, and political analyst based in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Currently he teaches at IUBAT.