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The strange brouhaha over Uber in Dhaka

Ashfaque SWAPAN
I have fond memories of Dhaka in my youth. This was in the mid-1980s, when Dhaka was not such a harrowingly dysfunctional metropolis. I used to move around
town in a bicycle in my student days and even during early professional life - much to the despair of my status-conscious colleagues. It felt wonderful to go to my favourite haunts virtually any time I liked - the British Council was a wondrously rich library then, nestled in lush green. I spent a lot of time at the American Cultural Centre in Dhanmandi and I hung out with friends at Elephant Road or Road No. 2 in Dhanmandi. I was a regular at Nirob, a restaurant in old Dhaka, which served delectable, flaky parathas with fried, spicy
brain. Or at the crack of dawn I would ride my bike to old Dhaka for an early breakfast of hajir biryani. Ah, the whiff of freshly cooked biriyani wafting on a cool winter morning still makes my mouth water!
Then over 25 years ago, I ended up living in the United States. Now I come to Dhaka every year in the winter to spend time with my mother.What pains me most is the difficulty in moving around. From Gulshan, going to see a friend in Dhanmandi is a nightmare. One doesn't know how long it will take, or even if transportation will be available. CNGs, which I use now, can be as elusive as the Royal Bengal tiger. CNG drivers in Dhaka must have been to Paris. How else could they have mastered so perfectly the haughty Parisian waiter's art of steadfastly avoiding eye contact?
I was excited when Uber came to Dhaka. I live in Atlanta. I haven't had a car for the past few months. Uber - and Lyft, a similar service- has been a life-saver. It's far cheaper than a regular taxi, and 1 have never to wait more than five minutes -and I have called Uber/Lyft in the wee hours of the night. I meet wonderful people along the way - students, homemakers, mature people who work a day job or go to night school, or both. Everybody is delighted with the new,
flexible source of income.
It is blindingly obvious that Uber is a Godsend for Dhaka. Let's face it - Dhaka is a dystopian nightmare of a megalopolis -traffic snarls cripple daily life. Dhaka is not alone. Call it the tyranny of economic circumstances in developing countries. Major cities, from Mexico City to Mumbai, Bangkok to Manila - each of these cities has become a dystopian, nightmarish megalopolis.
The Bangladesh Road Transportation Authority has decided, in its infinite wisdom, that Uber does not meet its regulations. Its critique of Uber reads like a parody of inert bureaucratic obtuseness. BRTA's objection is that Uber does not meet the standards of that state-of-the-art guide to civic life, the Jurassic-era motor laws created by the long-gone British raj at the beginning of the last century when Dhaka hardly had 100 cars, probably much fewer.
The suggestion that Uber cars must be painted and marked as taxis reflects an embarrassing failure to understand what Uber is. Uber is not a taxi service. It is a digital tool, and an ingenious one at that. What it does is use existing capacity to fill an urgent civic need without burdening the streets with extra traffic. An Uber vehicle is not a taxi, it is a judicious use of
the free time of a car which is otherwise used for personal or business reasons.
This is not to say that Uber does not have any hazards. Women Uber passengers have been assaulted in Delhi. But here again, Uber there is no reason for concern. Between Uber's records and vetting of drivers and the money trail left by passengers, both passenger and driver can be tracked if anything unpleasant happens.
Uber can ease the sense of helplessness for citizens of Dhaka who don't own a car, or don't want the hassle of being driven around every time they step outside their home. It could provide a new source of earnings- always welcome with our surging young population and very few jobs. It can do this without adding a single car on the roads.
I hope BRIA comes to its senses. Laws are made to serve people, not the other way around. BRTA should do the right thing sooner rather than later, and prove former Israeli foreign minister Abba Eban wrong.
"Men and nations do behave wisely, after all other alternatives have been exhausted," Eban once quipped.
The writer is a contributing editor for Siliconeer, a monthly periodical for South Asians In the United States. He has been writing for US-based South Aslan media for over 25 years.