Bangladesh is investing heavily in the physical landscape of logistics. New port terminals are being developed, railway capacity is being expanded, inland container facilities are receiving renewed attention, and private participation is growing across transport and logistics.
These investments are essential. But another question deserves equal attention: are the rules, institutions and legal frameworks governing cargo movement and logistics markets modernising at the same pace? Too often, they are not.
This is Bangladesh’s less visible logistics challenge – the soft infrastructure deficit. Soft infrastructure includes laws, regulations, international conventions, standard transport documents, liability regimes, customs procedures, data standards, competition rules and institutional arrangements. They determine how efficiently physical infrastructure can be used. A modern terminal may discharge a container within minutes, yet the gain can disappear if the container then encounters repeated approvals, uncertain documentation, incompatible systems or outdated legal requirements.
International containers offer one example. A container is transport equipment rather than the cargo commodity it carries. The Customs Convention on Containers, 1972 provides an international framework for temporary admission and movement of containers. Bangladesh is not currently among its contracting parties.
That does not mean accession should be automatic. But Bangladesh should examine whether domestic rules governing foreign containers, including empty equipment, are proportionate to modern logistics needs. When equipment is unnecessarily immobilised, scarce yard space is consumed and repositioning becomes harder. Part of a perceived port-capacity problem may therefore originate in the rules governing the equipment itself.
The same question arises regarding land transport. Frameworks such as the CMR Convention for road carriage and COTIF/CIM for rail show how standard documentation, clearer liability and legal certainty can support cross-border freight. Bangladesh is not currently a party to CMR and is not among OTIF’s current COTIF member states.
The digital transition makes the soft-infrastructure gap even more visible. Bangladesh is a party to the IMO Facilitation Convention, under which the maritime single-window requirement became mandatory from January 2024. But a Maritime Single Window is not merely software. It requires public authorities to be legally and institutionally able to accept, exchange, validate and reuse information.
An API can connect two computer systems. It cannot decide which agency is the authoritative source for a data element, whether another agency may legally rely on it, who is responsible if it is wrong, or how confidentiality, cybersecurity and reuse are governed. Without those answers, interoperability is not merely an IT problem; it becomes a problem of law, mandate and institutional trust.
The same applies to the Maritime Single Window, Bangladesh Single Window and any future Port Community System. If mandates, data boundaries and interoperability rules are not defined early, digitalisation can reproduce institutional fragmentation rather than remove it.
There is another legal lawyer. A landing bill is not merely information; it can embody rights connected with control and delivery of goods. Scanning it into a PDF does not necessarily reproduce those functions electronically. The UNCITRAL Model Law on Electronic Transferable Records (MLETR) provides a framework for electronic records to perform the legal functions of their paper equivalents. Bangladesh is not currently listed among jurisdictions with MLETR-based legislation. The contradiction is striking: data may travel instantly while legal rights continue to travel by paper.
But soft infrastructure is equally important when Bangladesh invites global terminal operators. A concession is not simply a commercial agreement with one investor. It can shape the structure of a port market for twenty or thirty years. Concession policy must therefore address not only investment, performance and risk allocation, but also market concentration, future entry, tariff discipline and competitive neutrality.
The economic logic is straightforward. Market-based pricing works best when users have credible alternatives and operators face genuine competitive pressure. Where one operator controls a large proportion of substitutable terminal capacity, normal market discipline can weaken. The World Bank’s latest Port Reform Toolkit therefore treats competition and economic regulation as integral to private participation in ports.
India provides a useful historical example. In 2010, it adopted a policy under which, where only one private operator handled a particular cargo at a major port, that operator and its associates could not bid for the next terminal handling the same cargo at that port. The policy has since been archived, so it should not be copied as current Indian law. But the principle remains instructive: competition safeguards can be designed before concessions are awarded rather than after concentration has already occurred.
Bangladesh now has a live reason to consider this issue. Negotiations continue with DP World over operation and upgrading of the existing New Mooring Container Terminal. Separately, recent public reporting indicates a preliminary understanding with DP World concerning one of the future Bay Terminal container terminals, although the Bay Terminal arrangements remain under development and no final concession should be assumed.
The point is not whether DP World – or any international operator – should receive either terminal. The question is whether Bangladesh has a transparent ex-ante competition framework for determining how one concession affects the wider port market.
Bangladesh already has the Competition Act 2012, including provisions against abuse of dominant position. But a long-term terminal concession can reshape market structure before abuse occurs. Concession design should therefore require assessment of the relevant market, existing and proposed capacity shares, corporate affiliations, vertical integration, future entry and whether port users will retain credible alternatives.
Bangladesh therefore needs a structured Logistics Legal Modernisation Programme. It should invent relevant international instruments and domestic laws, identify gaps, prioritise reforms according to trade impact, and modernise legislation, rules and procedures. The programme should cover not only containers, transit, electronic trade documents and interoperability, but also the legal architecture for PPPs and terminal concessions that attract investment while preserving competition.
The National Logistics Policy 2025 has already created a formal framework for cross-government logistics coordination. Its English version was officially gazetted on August 13, 2026. One of the first tests of that architecture should be whether it can lead such a systematic modernisation of Bangladesh’s logistics rulebook.
Bangladesh’s next logistics transformation cannot be measured only in kilometres of railway, metres of quay wall, numbers of cranes or new digital platforms.
We are building the hardware of a modern logistics economy. We must now modernise the rulebook governing how that infrastructure is used, connected and competitively operated. Without modern soft infrastructure, even world-class physical infrastructure will struggle to deliver world-class logistics.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is a Maritime, Logistics and Supply Chain Policy Analyst, and Former Head of ICD Kamalapur & Pangaon ICT
