Picture your own evening in Dhaka. You leave work tired and reach a busy crossing. Your child waits beside you, holding your hand. A battery powered rickshaw comes straight at you on the wrong side of the road.
It has no number plate. Its driver holds no licence. No fitness test has ever checked its brakes. You pull your child back, and it rushes past. You breathe out and cross, because there is no other way home.
The Bangladesh Road Transport Authority estimates that 10 to 12 lakh of these vehicles run in this city, though no office holds an exact count. Some evenings, someone does not pull back in time. The driver who hits them will most likely never face a conviction.
The scale is not a matter of opinion. Road accidents killed 9,111 people and injured 14,812 others across Bangladesh in 2025, a nearly six percent rise over the previous year. In Dhaka alone, 1,384 people were killed in road crashes between 2020 and July this year, and pedestrians, the people with no vehicle and no fault, made up 42.77 percent of the dead. Auto-rickshaws, CNG three-wheelers, and legunas together were involved in well over a tenth of all recorded crashes in that same stretch. These are abstractions. More so, they are people crossing a road that never had a working signal.
Ask anyone who commutes through Kuril, Mirpur, or Gulistan on a given evening, and battery rickshaws will come up before anything else does.
The Bangladesh Power Development Board estimates that 45 to 50 lakh battery powered rickshaws and easy bikes now operate nationwide, most outside any formal registry. Dhaka's new AI powered traffic camera system, launched this year to automatically fine violators, has run into exactly this wall.
Cameras can identify a bus or a car by its plate, but most auto-rickshaws carry no digital plate at all, so the system cannot see them. Drivers know it. Wrong way movement on routes such as 300 Feet Road, Kuril-Badda, and Moghbazar continues largely unpunished, because the tool built to catch it cannot legally identify the offender.
This is not a story of reckless individuals alone. It is a story of a vehicle class that grew faster than any ministry chose to regulate it, because regulating it would mean confronting the livelihoods of millions of low income drivers at once.
Even editorial voices now conceding the need for authorized manufacturing, registration, and defined routes warn against a blanket crackdown that would strip a poor driver of his only income overnight. Both things are true simultaneously.
That is precisely the trap.
Move from three-wheelers to buses and trucks and the same pattern holds.
A 2025 investigation found that 63.29 percent of people seeking BRTA services had to pay a bribe, and unskilled drivers routinely buy what insiders call a contract licence, a stamp of competence with no test behind it.
A driver earning a few thousand taka a month cannot afford the weeks a proper licensing process demands, so he pays the shortcut instead, and the owner who hires him never asks for a genuine result, because a cheap, undertrained driver saves the owner money either way.
Here poverty stops being an excuse and becomes a shield. Only about five percent of road accident cases in Bangladesh end in conviction. The maximum sentence for causing death through reckless driving once stood at seven years.
In 1985, after truckers protested, the Ershad government cut it to three, where it remains. Compensation follows the same script. The Road Transport Act 2018 quietly replaced a victim's right to sue an owner in court with a right to merely apply for aid from a state fund, and today only around five percent of victims ever receive a payout, capped at five lakh taka for a death regardless of fault.
Lawmakers assumed, correctly in most cases, that a driver or owner cannot afford a real settlement, so the state built a shared fund instead of individual liability, quietly telling every reckless driver that poverty, his own and his employer's, will absorb the cost of whoever he kills.
This pattern is not unique to us. Research on paratransit across the developing world finds the same feature everywhere, informal three-wheelers filling gaps formal transit leaves behind, operating with almost no oversight, and the resulting safety costs landing hardest on the poorest road users. What varies is how seriously a government decides to close that gap.
The people dying under these wheels are, overwhelmingly, just as poor as the men driving them.
This is poverty killing poverty, while transport owners' associations that resist digitized licensing and oppose stricter fitness checks sit comfortably above it all.
Real reform is not sympathy for reckless driving. It is mandatory digital plates and a real national registry for every battery rickshaw on the road, so an AI camera can finally see what it is built to catch.
It is an enforceable right to sue, so liability lands on the owner, not the driver he underpays. It is a compensation fund that pays out in weeks, not years, and scales with fault.
Until then, poverty will keep functioning exactly as it does now on our roads, not as a tragedy the state is fighting, but as a ticket the state has already priced in.
AKM Lutfur Rahman is a Commonwealth Scholar, Road Safety Expert, and experienced Transport Director having held high-impact positions at the British High Commission, CARE Bangladesh, and in roles affiliated with the US Embassy. Nafis Ehsas Chowdhury is Officer, Corporate HR & OD at Ha-Meem Group and an Independent Columnist.