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How unrest dented transport business

Shariful Islam
AK Travels is an apt example how the recent blockades and shutdowns have taken a toll on the transport sector.
Starting five years back with only five buses, the Satkhira-based transport company saw a thriving business until recently.
Now the company owns 60 buses, including several luxury AG coaches, and operates from almost all the districts in Khulna division to Dhaka.
Like other operators, AK Travels also purchased all its buses on bank loans for which it has to pay around Tk 95 lakh per month in instalments.
Even after paying the instalments and meeting other expenses for fuel, maintenance and salary of the staffers, the company was making a good profit.
But, repeated shutdowns and blockades during the last couple of months have hit the company so hard that it could not pay any instalment as none of its costly long-haul buses could make a trip.
Keeping the buses stranded for a day means no earning, but still the company has to pay around Tk 1 lakh per day in foods, lodging and salaries of more than 1,100 employees.
During October-December, the BNP-led alliance enforced 40 days of countrywide shutdowns and blockades. Buses could not ply the roads for at least two more days in December when the government restricted vehicular movement to foil the alliance's 'March for Democracy'’.
"I'm ruined," this is how Tahmid Shahed Chayan, the owner of AK Travels, vented his frustrations.
"We're counting huge losses everyday due to hartals and blockades," Chayan told The Daily Star recently at his Satkhira head office.
Chayan, who also owns 20 trucks, said three of his vehicles - one bus costing around Tk 1 crore and two trucks - were torched during the political unrest in the last few months. Besides, 15 buses and trucks were vandalised.
Not only Chayan, all long-haul bus operators faced the same fate.
"I did not experience such a disastrous situation in my 42 years of transport business," said Ramesh Chandra Ghosh, managing director of Shyamoli Paribahan, a leading operator with more than 500 buses on different routes across the country'.
He said he incurred a loss of around Tk 40 lakh a day during shutdowns and blockades.
Around one lakh trucks, lorries and pickups, and 86,000 large and small buses operate across the country' employing around forty lakh people, according to Bangladesh Sarak Paribahan Sramik Federation, a platform of transport workers.
As all these workers earn on a daily basis, frequent shutdowns or blockades push them into deep troubles, transport owners said.