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Tariqul Hasan, a small trader, passed his driving licence test in February last year. However, he still has not got his licence even though 14 months have gone by since then.
Like Hasan, 1.25 million people have been waiting to get their driving licences even after passing the test.
Some one million drivers are currently driving with an “acknowledgment slip”, but they are not able to apply for government and private jobs as they don’t have smart driving licence cards.
Additionally, around 300,000 people are unable to renew their driving licences even after applying a couple of years ago.
Habibur Rahman, another driving licence seeker, said he lost his licence a couple of years ago. He is still waiting for a reissue after applying for it last year.
Habib said he could not switch his current driving job, even after getting a higher salary, due to the driving licence issue.
People seeking driving jobs abroad are also suffering to a great extent. Many people are losing their confirmed jobs abroad due to not having smart driving licence cards.
Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory (BMTF) and Madras Security Printers Ltd are responsible for this terrible suffering of people as the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) has assigned them the task of delivering the smart cards.
However, they have been unable to provide the smart driving licences to the BRTA despite the agreement.
Reason behind the mess
BRTA signed an agreement of Tk100 crore with Indian company, Madras Security Printers (MSP) Ltd, on July 29, 2020 after the end of the contract with Tiger IT, which previously delivered the cards.
As per contract, MSP was supposed to provide four million cards in five years (June 2025). Of them, 900,000 cards were set to be delivered within December 2021.
But until July 2021, MSP managed to deliver only 7,400 cards owing to importing low category machines.
As a backlog has been there due to the slow delivery by MSP, the BRTA reached an agreement with the Bangladesh Machine Tools Factory (BMTF) on August 29, 2021 on the printing of smart driving licences.
According to the agreement, the BMTF would start issuing the cards from October 2021 and provide 1.25 million driving licences within March 2022.
However, the initiative did not go smoothly due to the poor capacity of the printing machines. The BMTF could deliver only 300,000 smart driving licences until March.
When will the problem be solved?
BRTA officials have claimed the problem will be solved immediately as new printing machines are on the way.
“The agreement with BMTF has been extended until September this year on the delivery of 900,000 smart driving licences,” said Mahbub E Rabbani, director of BRTA.
“So, by this time the backlog of driving licences will mostly be cleared as BMTF is going to install new machines by May,” he told Dhaka Tribune on Thursday.According to the BRTA official, new printing machines are on the way to gear up printing activities. BMTF will be able to print 10,000-15,000 cards a day.
Meanwhile, MSP has already imported new machines from abroad in order to deliver smart cards quickly.
According to BRTA officials, MSP can deliver some 4,000 cards a day from May, which may start to gradually alleviate the sufferings of hundreds of licence seekers.