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The Bangladesh Road Transport Authority has restarted an initiative after 12 years to bring the motor vehicle workshops under registration as required by the Road Transport Act, 2018. 

Reacting to the attempt, leaders of the Bangladesh Automobile Workshop Owners’ Association threatened legal action against the BRTA, saying that they were not informed of this initiative at all.

Twelve years ago the same association halted the first initiative to bring these workshops under registration.  

This time, the association leaders also said that they already had licence from the commerce ministry and they would go for movement if the initiative would not be cancelled.

BRTA chairman Nur Mohammad Mazumder told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Tuesday that they had taken the initiative as numerous automobile workshops were operating everywhere in the country.

‘If we have any conflict with any other ministry then we will hold inter-ministerial meeting to fix the jurisdiction,’ he said, responding to the association’s objection.

Registration should not be a matter of ‘headache’ for the workshop owners, he added.

While the BRTA has no statistics on the number of these workshops countrywide, the association put the number at over 30,000 across the country.

Automobile workshops are a common scene in lanes and by-lanes particularly in the urban spaces where workers can be seen at work without almost any safety gears.

Underage workers are also seen in these workshops. 

In 2012, the BRTA ran two advertisements in February and March asking workshops to get registered with it as it had plans to outsource the task of vehicle fitness examination to the workshops.

The move was halted after the workshop owners’ association had demanded that its representatives had to be incorporated in the Bangladesh Automobile Workshop Registration Providing Committee set up by the road transport agency.

On Tuesday, at an opinion sharing meeting with the reporters working in the sector and attended by the BRTA chairman, a keynote paper mentioned that the Road Transport Act 2018 through its section 64 made it compulsory to register motor vehicle workshops with the BRTA.

The matter of registering motor vehicles workshops with the BRTA is stipulated in Rule 156, 157 and 158 of the Road Transport Rules, 2022. 

Earlier this year on January 1, a circular was published on the formation of a five-member election board to give recommendations on providing registrations to the workshops as per the rules.

The election board was formed with representatives from the BRTA, district administration, Bangladesh police and Directorate of Labour.

Bangladesh Automobile Workshop Owners’ Association president Ismail Karim Chowdhury told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Tuesday that they had licences from the commerce ministry to run their business.

‘The BRTA has no jurisdiction over us,’ he said, adding, ‘we will file case or writ against the BRTA soon.’

He also said that currently the association had around 3,000 motor vehicle workshops registered as members.

Nur Mohammad Mazumder said that no representatives from the association had met them with their demands yet.

‘Soon we will get the statistics from the board on these workshops and then we will start registration,’ he said, adding, ‘these workshops cannot run freestyle.’