In Dhaka today, the average speed of a vehicle on the road has fallen to under five kilometres an hour, down from twenty-one two decades ago. That is slower than a brisk walk. A city of twenty million people, moving at the pace of a funeral procession. And into this paralysis, every morning, thousands more battery-powered rickshaws pour onto streets that cannot accommodate the ones already there.
By recent estimates, there are around two million of them in Dhaka, and perhaps six million across the country, though no authority can say for certain. Their drivers hold no licences and have received no training in traffic law or motor vehicle operation. Under existing law, there is not even a category into which these machines fit, which means traffic police have no instrument to act against them. You cannot fine what the law does not see. It is a regulatory blind spot so convenient to so many parties that one begins to wonder whether it is truly an oversight at all.
It is estimated that Tk4,000 crore is drained annually from the grid in Dhaka alone by illegal charging points that keep these rickshaws running, with more recent estimates placing the nationwide figure considerably higher. This is not money disappearing into abstraction. It is power taken from public utilities, which means every ordinary Bangladeshi with an electricity bill is, unknowingly, subsidising an unregulated industry that the government will neither legalise nor stop. The chaos on the road has a cost, and the public is quietly paying it.
The timing is not a coincidence. In the disorder that followed the fall of the last government in August 2024, their numbers surged, and they stopped confining themselves to the alleys. They now dominate the main roads and the flyovers in every major city. Experts said plainly that these are slow, poorly designed vehicles that cannot be allowed on primary roads, and that the period since the uprising has brought more of them, not fewer.
Consider who benefits from this prolonged inaction. A study by Innovision Consulting found that nearly 60 percent of battery rickshaw owners financed their vehicles through NGO or microfinance loans, at an average of about Tk80,000 and interest rates between 20 and 38 percent. A man borrows that sum at punishing interest to buy a machine the state has, in effect, declared does not exist. It is not a way up. It is a more expensive way to remain exactly where he is, now with a debt attached. Meanwhile, the men supplying the motors, batteries, and conversion kits bear none of this risk. The garages assembling four and five hundred of these rickshaws a day break no law that anyone enforces. The profit accumulates upstream; the precarity pools at the bottom. For these suppliers, the unregulated streets of Dhaka are not a crisis but a captive market, and the longer the government delays, the deeper that market becomes.
There is an honest objection to all this, and it deserves to be met rather than dismissed. Many thoughtful people, including the very experts who call these vehicles unscientific, want a managed transition. The Innovision researchers hold that the depth of microfinance dependency should temper any aggressive crackdown, because these are not speculative investments but survival debts. That is the most serious case against everything that follows, and it should not be waved away.
To bring even a fraction of these operators into a formal system, the government would first have to train people who have never been taught a traffic rule, then build an enforcement apparatus monitoring them across. Neither exists. And the deeper problem lies with the machines themselves. The majority are not purpose-built vehicles at all. They are traditional cycle-rickshaws retrofitted with a motor and a battery, with fragile frames, inadequate brakes, no engineering standard and no fitness certification of any kind. This means that even the gentlest path would require stopping everything first: halting the new ones, removing the unfit ones, writing safety standards that do not yet exist, building a training and licensing pipeline from nothing, and establishing a registration system from scratch.
The government has, for its part, drafted the Electric Three-Wheeler Management Guidelines 2025, providing for registration, fitness certificates, driver licensing, and a crackdown on illegal charging stations. The draft was sent to the law ministry for vetting and, as of early 2026, had still not been enacted. A policy almost finished, and perpetually delayed. The only honest course is an immediate halt to the further sale and import of these rickshaws and their parts, accompanied by genuine enforcement against the suppliers, the dealers, and the illegal charging networks that have built profitable businesses inside this vacuum. A firm and public timeline for the phased removal of those already on the road must follow, and it must be matched by real resettlement support for the people pushed off it, who were sold this life by everyone’s silence.
The businessmen who profited from Dhaka’s disorder will be fine. They always are. The only question left is whether the government will act before the people who trusted the system, such as it is, are made to pay for its failures once again.
The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author
The writer is a CA aspirant, KPMG Bangladesh
