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Friday, causing great suffering to the common people and bringing the conveyance of goods to a standstill.

Three days later, to appease the operators the government hiked the bus fare by as much as 28 percent and launch fares by up to 43 percent.

“How come a state that is so powerful in all aspects increase the price this way just because of a two-day strike? The price was increased unreasonably because of pressure from one group -- it is not a politically enlightened decision,” Rahman said.

In both cases where the government had the power to administer, the decision of the government went against the consumers.

“This is not a morally acceptable decision,” Rahman said.

The think-tank purported that the government had an option to not raise the fuel prices.

If the global oil price continues to escalate, the government would need Tk 20 crore per day and Tk 7,200 crore a year to offset the maximum amount of loss, said Khondaker Golam Moazzem, research director of the CPD.

According to the CPD’s calculations, the government will generate additional revenue of Tk 7,838 crore from the BPC in the form of import duty and value-added tax.

The government could have temporarily withdrawn the import duty and VAT to adjust the losses, according to Moazzem.

“The decision to raise the fuel prices is not a politically timely one and the government should back down from this decision. There was an opportunity for the government to subsidise it and offset the rise in world oil prices,” he said.

If the decision was made with consultation with all the stakeholders and through a public hearing by the Bangladesh Energy Regulatory Commission (BERC) as per the law, the opinion of the consumers would have been reflected, the CPD said.

The BERC is a platform for the government to hear out the people’s problems.

“These decisions should be taken through a dialogue, not by bypassing the BERC and disabling it is not a solution,” Moazzem said.

What transpired was the BPC, which had logged in profits of Tk 43,136 crore between fiscals 2014-15 and 2020-21, wrote to the energy ministry seeking an increase in the prices and it was done, Rahman said.

Because of the state of recovery of the economy from the fallout of the global coronavirus pandemic, the stability of fuel price is critically important given the ‘strategic’ nature of the commodity, the think-tank said.

The hike will have both immediate and medium-term impacts on various sectors of the economy and derail the economic recovery.

The fuel price hike implies that there will be an increase in the transportation cost, agricultural cost and electricity cost. Thus, all production costs will increase leading to a spiralling of the cost of living.

For instance, the transport sector is passing on the burden of the hike to the consumers.

“The consumers have no one to pass on their burden,” Rahman said.

Besides, the price hike of diesel and kerosene came at a time when the daily necessities are becoming dearer.

The prices of several commodities shot up in November from a year earlier, shows data from the Trading Corporation of Bangladesh.

Subsequently, the think-tank called for reinstating the earlier prices of diesel and kerosene immediately.

The government does not lower the fuel prices when there is a fall in prices in the global market, said Fahmida Khatun, executive director of the CPD.

In April last year, fuel prices hit a trough of $23.3 per barrel following the coronavirus outbreak.

“But the fuel prices were not adjusted in the domestic market that time following the international rate. Yet, the moment it went up globally, so did the prices here.”

There should be a price-setting mechanism instead of the existing arbitrary practice, she said.