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POLITICAL VIOLENCE

Transport owners count huge losses

They counted Tk 4,200cr in losses as 4,000 vehicles were damaged in one and a half years

Helemul Alam and Jamil Mahmud
Political violence has taken a heavy toll on the road transport sector, with around 3,000 vehicles vandalised and 1,000 burnt in the last one and a half years.
Between June 2012 and December 8 this year, at least 42 drivers, helpers and conductors of vehicles such as bus, minibus, truck and CNG-run auto rickshaw were killed in violence, mainly arson attacks, and 500 were injured.
The transport sector suffered a loss of around Tk 4,200 crore during the period, according to Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation, a platform of transport workers.
Around seven million transport workers, who earn Tk 500 to Tk 1,200 each on usual days, remain jobless during blockades or shutdowns, said Osman Ali, general secretary of the platform.
Sayed Ahmed Akmal, owner of Uzzal Paribahan, said one of his four buses was torched during the opposition's blockade on November 3, though it was parked at Sayedabad bus terminal. It would costTk 10 lakh to repair the bus, he said.
"Since the blockades started, I have been facing a loss of around Tk 21,000 a day and the torching of the bus was a further blow," Akmal said.
Blockades and shutdowns are putting an immense pressure on those who took bank loans for buying vehicles as, with hardly or no income at all, 80 percent of them are now unable to pay their monthly instalments, said Mohammad Faruk, president of Dhaka-Sylhet Road Sramik Committee, another platform.
Meanwhile, family members of the transport workers injured during the recent spell of blockades and hartals are passing their days in uncertainty as the injured in most cases were the only earning members in their families.
"It seems we |the people of the country) are a football. The opposition leader is kicking us from one side and the prime minister from the other. And we do not know what really is happening with us," said Mohammad Mahbub Hasan, the driver of a bus which was set ablaze in the capital's Shahbagh intersection recently.
Hasan sustained 30 percent burns when blockaders hurled a petrol bomb at his bus near Shishu Park at Shahbagh on November 28, burning 19 people, three of whom later succumbed to their injuries. Hasan said he is worried about the future of his family if he fails to recover.
Al Amin, another bus driver who sustained 25 burns when blockaders torched his bus in Gazipur on December 3, said: "What will happen to my family if I die?" He is the sole bread earner of his eight-member family.
"How can a human being do this to another human being?" Al Amin said, writhing in pain on his hospital bed.