Photo: Collected
Metropolis Report-
Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity has demanded a 50 percent reduction in Metrorail fares in Dhaka to a minimum of Tk 10. On Saturday (December 17), the organization’s secretary general, Md Mozammel Haque Chowdhury, made this claim.
Mozammel Haque said that fixing the metro rail fare at twice the Dhaka city bus rate without the passengers’ opinion and any kind of observation is unreasonable and anti-people.
He said that although the per capita income and average GDP of Dhaka and Kolkata are almost at the same position, compared to Kolkata, the fare per kilometer in Dhaka metro rail is twice as high, and the minimum fare is four times higher. For this reason, the interest of passengers will be severely damaged, private bus companies will benefit, and poor passengers will lose the ability to use the metro rail. As a result, the achievement of passenger transport targets in metro rail will be hampered.
It was informed in the press conference that the metro rail fare for the 20 km distance from Uttara to Motijheel in Bangladesh has been set to Tk 100, which is about four times more than that of the Kolkata metro rail. Metro in India’s capital, New Delhi, costs Rs 40 or Rs 50 for the same distance, which drops to Rs 30 on holidays. A 32 km journey on Delhi Metro costs Rs 60.
Engineer and urban planner Mohammad Emdadul Islam said that because inexperienced people were tasked with building the metro rail, they only built it at the highest cost in Asia without any survey or research. To extort all the expenses from the passengers and benefit the private bus companies, the maximum fares have been fixed in Dhaka Metro Rail.
Public transport expert and former director of FBCCI, Abdul Haque, said apart from reducing the existing fare of metro rail, providing special subsidies on the monthly cards to regular passengers, fixing attractive fare rates on the closing days, adequate buses and other public transport should be arranged on the connecting road.
DMTCL, a government-owned company, is working on implementing the metro rail project in Dhaka with the funding of the Japanese government. The main cost of the metro rail project was 21 thousand 985 crores. Later, due to the additional section from Motijheel to Kamalapur, the project cost increased by another 11 thousand 496 crore 92 lakh taka. The total project cost has risen to 33 thousand 471 crores 99 lakh taka.
Metro rail has been prepared for movement from Diabari in Uttara to Agargaon. Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina will officially inaugurate the metro rail on December 28.
