Bus service on the Dhaka-Mymensingh Highway, which has been cratered and potholed for days, resumed on Tuesday evening after the government had assured the striking bus operators of early road repairs.
The owners of buses plying the route on August 11 stopped running their vehicles, demanding early road repairs. The strike on the route that connects the capital to five districts in the north caused immense suffering to the people of the region.
The owners had gone on strike as the highways became rickety, cratered, potholed in the absence of maintenance and repairs since 2005, making rides bumpy, risky and time-consuming.
Transport operators said that the condition of the highways had forced them to stop bus services.
No buses left the Mohakhali bus terminal for the route between Thursday and Tuesday evening while the Tangail District Bus Owners' Association had gone on strike for an indefinite period on the Dhaka-Tangail highways between Saturday and Monday in protest at the rickety road condition.
About a thousand buses leave the Mohakhali inter-district bus terminal carrying some 54,000 passengers every day to some 20 destinations in districts such as Mymensingh, Netrakona, Kishoreganj, Sherpur, Jamalpur, Gazipur, Tangail, Sirajganj, Bogra, Naogaon, Jaipurhat and Gaibandha.
The bus owners resumed operation on the route after a meeting with the people high up in the government.
After an emergency meeting with the prime minister, Sheikh Hasina, on Tuesday when Hasian directed the communications ministry to immediately repair the highways before Eid, the communications minister, Syed Abul Hossain, along with shipping minister Shahjahan Khan, sat at the meeting with the leadees of bus owners and workers' association at the Mohakhali bus terminal.
High communications ministry officials, including the secretary to the ministry, Roads and Highways Department officials and leaders of bus owners and workers attended the meeting that continued for more than an hour after iftar.
'We have decided to resume the bus service on the route as the ministers have assured us of early repiars of the road,' Moktar Hossain Khan, joint general secretary of the Mohakhali Bus Terminal Sarak Paribahan Malik Samiti, told New Age after the meeting.
'The ministers have told us that the repairs have already started,' he said. 'We have decided to resume bus service also in view of the plight of the people in Ramadan,' Moktar said.
The communications minister soon after the meeting with the prime minister went to inspect the highway in Gazipur.
As the motorcade of the minister reached Mowna in Gazipur, a police pickup van of the minister's entourage got stuck into a crater on the road, halting the inspection for a while.
The minister did not talk with reporters when they tried to get his comment. He did not even open the window of his car.
The New Age correspondent in Gazipur said that the Roads and Highways Department had started the repair work on Monday.
Source : New Age
