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Modifications of buses and trucks across the country remain a big concern for road safety as such modifications have been resulting in increased accidents and greater damages to roads and highways.

Both government officials and road safety experts said that modifications of vehicles, especially buses and trucks, have been going unabated for a long time.

Altering vehicle features ­­by way of modification -- distorting standard designs -- is not only an indirect reason behind road crashes, but is also directly responsible for increasing the impact of damages and the number of casualties.

Modified goods-carrying vehicles damage roads and highways as they are usually modified to carry greater quantities of goods in contravention to government parameters.

Experts blamed higher-than-usual profit-seeking transport owners, unskilled workers at workshops, lax monitoring and a lack of necessary infrastructures of the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority behind the situation.

Along with addressing these issues, experts also urged the government to digitalise the vehicle inspection system and allow designated private workshops to check vehicles on an urgent basis according to set standard criteria.

Modifications of buses and trucks for using them to carry more passengers and goods than allowed are carried on openly at different workshops in Dhaka and elsewhere across the country.

On Tuesday, some workers, including underage ones, were seen at some workshops at Kazla in Demra in the outskirts of the capital working on some buses.

Besides buses and trucks, modifying other vehicles such as cars and motorcycles are also commonplace around the country.  

On April 17, the driver of a Barishal Express company bus hit a car and a covered van from behind on the Dhaka-Mawa Expressway at Kamarkhola railway flyover under Sreenagar upazila in Munshiganj.

The bus then recklessly hit a railing of the expressway at Somoshpur while its roof flied away, leaving eight of the bus passengers injured.

Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology’s Accident Research Institute assistant professor Kazi Md Shifun Newaz said this incident is an example of what modified vehicles can cause while running on the road.

‘Illegal vehicles are not the only major factor responsible for road crashes, but illegal modifications of legal vehicles are also one of them,’ he observed.

Shifun Newaz said that modifications are mainly done by bus and truck owners --for increasing the length and the width of these vehicles -- to earn a greater profit by carrying extra goods and passengers beyond their limit.

‘Modifications of vehicles are indirectly involved in road accidents, but directly in fatalities as they increase the number of casualties,’ he added.

Acknowledging the matter, BRTA director (engineering) Sitangshu Shekhar Biswas said, ‘We are not being able to stop modifications of these vehicles in any way.’

‘In Bangladesh, owners use two-axle vehicles with six-wheels to save money as they do not want to use three or four axle vehicles, because such vehicles require more wheels to operate,’ he said.

The BRTA director reminded that the maximum load-limit for a two-axle vehicle is 15.5 tonnes, including the vehicle, while these vehicles are often used to carry even 25 to 30 tonnes of weight.

‘These modified vehicles are damaging our roads and weighing scales, as well,’ he added.

Involvement of buses and goods-carrying vehicles is also very common in fatal road accidents.

According to the Passenger Welfare Association of Bangladesh, the involvement of trucks, pickups, covered vans and lorries in fatal road crashes in 2024 was 23.33 per cent of all such accidents while the share of buses was 13.45 per cent.

Shifun Newaz said that the practice of illegally modifying vehicles has been continuing in the country for a long time at substandard automobile workshops or road-side garages.

Citing a study he and another institute teacher conducted in 2019 on an accident similar to the one on April 17 mentioned, he said that owners were found to have increased the length of bus chassis at the back side so that they could have two or three more rows of passenger seats added to the bus.

Owners were also found to have modified the seat arrangement to reduce the gaps between the seat rows in order to be able to carry more passengers than permitted, he said.

‘This kind of modification creates a load imbalance and during accidents passengers get stuck between seat rows,’ he pointed out.

Shifun Newaz went on to say that owners also made workshop workers reduce the standard steel cross section and use low-quality materials to save money, rendering the bus weak and fragile.

While setting up the body on a chassis, unskilled workers, who have no knowledge of aspects like vehicle stability, welding standard, centre of gravity of the vehicle weight, and the momentum of inertia, often failed to join the body properly, he further said.

In cases of trucks, the BUET teacher said, while owners kept the driver’s cabins intact, they got the width between the two sides and the length of the carrier of trucks increased so that they could carry more goods, in addition to putting longer steel bumpers in front of trucks.

To support the increased weight, owners install some angles or bars on the two sides of trucks and increase the length of the chassis, he added.

‘As a result, when there occurs a road crash because of a partial head-on collision, other vehicles or people in other vehicles usually get stuck into truck angles or against bars,’ he said, adding that the number of causalties is relatively bigger as the vehicles involved become unbalanced.  

Bangladesh Bus-Truck Owners Association chairman and Shyamoli Paribahan managing director Ramesh Chandra Ghosh said as far as he can remember vehicle modifications have been in practice since 1973.

Mainly, he said, city service buses and goods-carrying vehicles are modified.

Passenger Welfare Association of Bangladesh secretary general Mozammel Hoque Chowdhury said modifications of vehicles has been going unabated as there is no monitoring on the poorly equipped workshops.

He also alleged that many old vehicles are running in new bodies by way of modification as the owners are intent only on own financial gains, ignoring technical issues.

‘On an emergency basis, the government should bring all the automobile workshops under registration based on their compliance with a set of minimum requirements. They should also be allowed to check the vehicles,’ he added.

Shifun Newaz said if a vehicle inspector wants to check all the 52 items of a vehicle, they would need one to one and a half hour for the job.

‘The government should, therefore, digitalise the BRTA services for a quick and smooth vehicle inspection,’ he said, adding, ‘The government should issue certificates for those workshops which can assemble vehicles in standard way.’

BRTA director Sitangshu Shekhar Biswas said that they have currently one automatic Vehicle Inspection Centre at Mirpur in Dhaka with the capacity of checking 1,000 vehicles per day.

Under the BRTA, 63.4 lakh motor vehicles were registered till March this year.

Currently, under the proposed ‘Bangladesh Clean Air Project’ with support from the World Bank, seven more VICs and five mobile VICs would be installed across the country at a cost of some Tk 432 crore within five years, he said. 

The proposal for the project is currently at the planning ministry, he added.

On December 19 last year, road transport and bridges ministry adviser Muhammad Fouzul Kabir Khan asked BRTA officials to take steps to improve its fitness checking and driving licence delivery services by taking assistance from private institutions such as garages and driving schools, and the police.

Replying to a question on the progress of the order, the adviser told ¶¶Òõ¾«Æ· on Wednesday that they are looking into the matter.