Taking a bus ride in the capital is a nightmare for most of the commuters due to poor quality of private bus services which dominate the city traffic landscape.
Reckless driving, unhygienic and dirty interiors and arbitrary rates of fare are common phenomena in all the private bus services - all of which cause immense sufferings to the city dwellers. A ride on these buses on way to office or back home is enough to exhaust anyone.
So, when the Bangladesh Road Transport Corporation (BRTC), the state-owned transport enterprise, launched bus services which were being operated with high quality buses, those got popularity among the commuters.
With a small fleet, the BRTC services provided a relief to passengers who used to face unbearable troubles while commuting on private buses.
But their happiness did not last long as these BRTC bus services have failed to continue their operations. All the popular services launched by the state-owned agency were suspended because at the end of the day most of the buses went out of order.
Premature shut-down of the BRTC's popular services raises question over the efficiency of the state-owned agency in running businesses. When BRTC is suspending its services, private bus services are expanding their operations.
In its latest move, all the 45 air-conditioned buses shuttling between Dhaka and Narayanganj have been suspended.
These buses were supplied by South Korean automobile giant Daewoo. In 2011, the government procured 255 AC and non-AC buses from Daewoo. It is learnt that 104 of these buses went out of order and the 45 AC buses used to ply on the Dhaka-Narayanganj route were among those.
Coincidentally, at the same time an AC bus service run by a private company on the same route managed to expand its operation.
Earlier, another popular bus service of BRTC, the double-decker Volvo bus service met the same fate. The BRTC procured fifty 119-seater buses from world-famous Swedish transport manufacturer Volvo Bus Corporation in 2002, at a cost of TK 12.66 million each but all of those became inoperative within six years.
The BRTC once operated 1,400 buses in different routes across the country but the number came down by half last year. Some of its popular inter-district services including Dhaka-Bandarban, Dhaka Cox's Bazar service, became irregular due to 'shortage of buses'.
These buses became inoperative due to mechanical fault and lack of proper maintenance -- a sign of sheer negligence on the part of the BRTC authority.
Like most of the subsidised government entities, the BRTC has also been run in an unprofessional manner. Mismanagement and irregularities apparently rule the roost in this organisation which once had the fame of running efficient bus services on all the inter-district routes.
On the other hand, a nexus between private bus operators and a section of BRTC employees is also blamed for the premature death of the BRTC buses since suspension of BRTC's popular services benefits the bus operators.
In many cases, buses cannot be repaired due to lack of spare parts. The Volvo procurement contract did not include supply of spare parts and warranty.
Time has come to find out what is actually going wrong with these services. The procurement system also needs to be reassessed for supply of spare parts is not tagged with the purchase of buses at times. And thus repairing works become costly and time-consuming by importing spares parts from abroad.
The authorities should also look into the allegations about the involvement of BRTC insiders for the discontinuation of these popular services. There is need for urgent reform to the corporation for it to run a popular service in a sustainable manner. Otherwise, its officially publicised vision to 'provide safe and comfortable bus services to people' will simply be a myth.
