Irregularity and corruption of employees are preventing Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC) from giving the best of its services in the capital, although the state-owned transport agency expanded its fleet and routes.
The BTRC buses that ply the city streets are supposed to stop or pick up passengers only at the designated bus stoppages. Passengers can supposedly get on to one of these buses only if they buy a ticket from the counters.
But, the drivers and conductors of the BRTC buses never follow that rule.
They are often seen stopping at busy intersections of the city where there is no designated bus stoppage and picking up commuters without tickets.
The drivers and conductors then collect the fare inside the buses from the passengers who get on without tickets.
A BRTC official said these bus staff do not have any authority whatsoever to collect fares in that manner.
The money that they collect should have otherwise gone to the government exchequer if the passengers lawfully bought tickets from a designated counter, he said.
This is nothing but embezzling public money, he alleged.
Passengers have complained that the staff of these buses often force them to pay more than the ticket price and if anyone refuses to do so, they behave roughly with them.
Seeking anonymity, the driver of a BRTC bus told the Dhaka Tribune: “I had to pay nearly Tk300,000 as bribe for getting this job. The salary that I receive would take me years to cover for that amount. So I have to find an alternative way of earning money.”
“It is not just me. All the other staffs are making huge amounts of illegal money in different ways,” he claimed.
BRTC officials informed that a total of 640 air conditioned (AC) and non-AC buses of the corporation operate on 11 routes inside the capital.
The BRTC fleet comprises three kinds of buses – single decker, double decker and articulated – mainly imported from India, China, South Korea and Sweden, they said.
The state run transport company has often been blamed for expanding the size of its fleet of buses indiscriminately and in unplanned ways without recruiting adequate manpower for dealing with the additional vehicles.
There are also allegations that the BRTC management, under the influence of vested groups and individuals, keep away from recruiting additional manpower so that private companies can get lease for operating the new buses.
Another BRTC official, also on condition of anonymity, said the BRTC buses are never maintained properly and the corruption of a number of officials and employees plunge the company into loses.
But when the private companies ran these buses, they made handsome profits, he said.
Khan Kamal Uddin, deputy general manager (operations) of BRTC, told the Dhaka Tribune: “The complaints are not entirely true. We know that some drivers, conductors and checkers are resorting to corruption. In order to stop this, we have decided to introduce the e-ticketing system called ‘pass card’ for BRTC city services in the capital.”
The new e-ticketing system as already been introduced on the Motijheel-Uttara route and all commuters of the capital would be able to benefit from it from next April, he said.
“BRTC has 640 buses in the capital and 88 more AC and 30 more articulated buses will be added to the fleet by next April,” he said.
Kamal Uddin claimed that BRTC was not incurring losses and that the government owned buses were leased out during the tenure of the BNP-led 4-party alliance government.
