Metro shuttles back and forth over our head Bangladesh inaugurated its Metro service with much fanfare.Though Metro network has yet to be completed,only two stations (Agargaon and Uttara(North)) are ready for commuters.Thousands of commuters thronged the stations, causing technical glitch to ticket vending machines and giving tough time to staff and guards who are unfamiliar with dealing such a huge crowd. Govt tried to project it as another development milestone, muffling the crackdown on thousands of opposition activists including detention of senior leaders.Yet many commuters felt it would be much better if Farmgate station were made ready for use. Now distance between Agargaon and Uttara only takes 10 minutes 10 seconds! Nobody could ever imagine that from Mirpur or Agargaon or even from Farmgate Uttara is just 10 minutes away. Many like me believe govt could easily open the Uttara-Motijheel route before the new year. Great effort and commitment could make it possible. But the service is deliberately scheduled to come into fruition by the end of this year to bag more votes ahead of next election. One shrewd politician once said about opening new road and bridge ahead of election year:"Well you see people here have a tendency to forget things quickly. They forget the good things very quickly.Let them feel the pain travelling on a road filled with potholes. Few months before election when they travel on new road they will tell themselves 'How bad the road was!' "This is indeed a sadistic mindset. The quicker our politicians and policymakers ditch it ,the better. I think this is not the first Metro service in Dhaka.The Demo train introduced back in 2014 on the route Dhaka-Gazipur and later on the route Dhaka-Narayanganj could vie for country's first Metro service. The shuttling service between Chattogram and Chattogram University could be another contender. Demo train is marred with corruption and trains remained out of service after the Chinese company had refused to provide source code of the software. Later Bangladeshi engineers developed a software and successfully installed it in one of the trains to resume operation.Demo trains now run on several routes and doomed ones await a new life thanks to the Bangladeshi software. 
On the inauguration day one JICA official said they are willing to share the Metro software with Bangladesh.This is an apt example where you demonstrated a capability and others offer something attractive and come up with sophisticated options. Our demo train software may not be the smart one or efficient one but it demonstrates our capability and a cost-effective alternative to the sophisticated ones.But our know-how and basic design could lead us to design and develop the smartest one.What we need is to demonstrate the capability. National Board of Revenue (NBR) demonstrated it when a Vietnamese IT Company abandoned the project of online tax return submission. NBR did the job at one-third of the cost and more than 100,000 people submitted tax return last year.By the same token if we design and develop a vending machine or a management software on our own ,we have an alternative ready and may be used it at any local station to improve it further. Like software, if we could design and develop rail coach, Metro coach on our own,oneday foreign companies that build rail coach could relocate factory/invest here,acknowledging our capability. Unfortunately, in Bangladesh we lack environment to foster local innovation and ideas.For instance, if our campuses showcase locally developed vending machine for coffee/snacks and allow locally manufactured four-stroke three-wheelers to roll on then more local initiatives become commercially viable. What I found interesting is that a minister said Metro fare is high due to the "technology" used here.All these years I learn technology is about to make lives easier and less expensive.In a corruption-ridden country we see the complete opposite. Metro fare is higher than neighboring countries.Rumours are rife that it is deliberately pegged high to give undue preferences to private transport business where organized groups hold sway over.There is no doubt that when Metro comes into operation there will be radical change to the private transport business,where opaque capital finds safe sanctuary.Moreover, govt does not get any revenue from this sector.
The Metro for the first time opens door for the govt to collect tax revenue from daily commuters.Like the mobile phone service, Metro will provide generous revenue to govt coffer every year, allowing it to finance projects by introducing supplementary duty on fare.The Metro will stop a large part of the commuters' money from falling into wrong hands.It will improve the political system by putting an end to the gray area in the transport sector.Now we have a mechanism to document and track commuters' money.The Metro will also work to decongest Dhaka,a densely populated city.Dhaka dwellers will move towards outskirts of the city where cost of living is much lower. The Metro will also be a testing case for us as urban dwellers.If we fail to make it neat and clean and safe then we will loose to our neighbors who have already made it a clean and safe mode of transportation. The grizzly Holey Artisan Bakery attack that killed many Metro consultants in Gulshan in 2016 left many questions unanswered.It is still unclear why the consultants were deliberately targeted,pushing Bangladesh-Japan ties on the brink of collapse. The Metro may not improve commuting experience and transport management overnight, but it will definitely do so in the future.In every aspect, it is indeed a game changing project.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
|
No comments:
Post a Comment