Businesses seek transit fee imposition on India vessels.

Business leaders and experts on Wednesday suggested imposition of transit fees and service charges on the Indian vessels plying through Bangladesh and introduction of multimodal transport facility under the Protocol on Inland Water Transit and Trade between the two countries.At a seminar on Bangladesh-India PIWTT: challenges and opportunities, they also urged the both sides to make the protocol effective and remove the customs and procedural constraints to boost bilateral and transit trade through proper connectivity.
They also suggested making joint investment to keep the routes navigable through continuous dredging, introducing cargo container and signing coastal shipping agreement to bolster bilateral trade through waterways.The countries should shift their mode of transportation to waterways from the saturated road ways to reduce cost of business, they said.
The Metropolitan Chamber of Commerce and Industry and the Indian High Commission in Dhaka jointly organised the seminar at the MCCI auditorium in the capital.
Favouring collecting transit fees and charges, MCCI president Syed Nasim Manzur said that the fees and service charges should be set considering returns on investment, benefits to be derived from the diversion of traffic, the direct and indirect benefits to be accrued to Bangladesh’s transport business and associated commercial activities.

‘A provision can be made in the PIWTT that a part of the income from fees and charges will be collected in a dedicated account for investment towards improvement of related infrastructure,’ he said.He also suggested working for multi-modal transport connectivity including water, rail and road transportation.Western Marine Shipyard chairman Saiful Islam said that now there was no transit fee under the protocol and so, the government should discuss with its counterpart to get transit fees and service charges.
Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority chairman Commodore Mozammel Haque said that Tk 10 crore given annually by India was not sufficient to maintain the navigability of protocol routes and dredging the rivers.The amount should be increased, he said.In the key note presentation, former BIWTA secretary Syed Monowar Hussain said that transit trade between the two countries did not increase despite huge potential due to poor navigational quality in river routes, absence of night navigational facilities, complex customs procedures, absence of container service and lack of loading and unloading facilities at ports.Shipwrights Resources Limited consultant Mahboob Ahmed said that both the governments should give emphasis on improving water transportation as movement of transit cargoes by road would be extremely difficult in future as the road ways have already become saturated.Prime minister’s economic affairs adviser Mashiur Rahman said that the issues related to transit fees to be sorted out after discussion in line with the GATT agreement.He also said that there should be multimodal transport system to facilitate transportation of goods to destination.

Road or rail transportation will be needed to send the goods in destination after carrying through river routes, he said.He said, ‘Both the governments can examine the possibility of joint investment in the activities like dredging.’
Indian high commissioner Pankaj Saran said that on transit fees, India had an open mind.‘We recognise that there will be fees and service charges and this is a legitimate issue for discussion as Bangladesh has every right to charge transit fees,’ he said.But it will have also to keep in mind if the transit fee is proportionate to what load the market bears, he said.
‘There will be no transit if fees are out priced for consumer,’ he added.He said that the potential for inland water transportation between India and Bangladesh still remained highly untapped and the protocol had not received good attention in the past.Indian government is now considering the water ways as means of national transportation and both the countries may work together to make a strategic shift away from road transportation to water transportation, he said.‘A lot of investment has to be made to maintain the waterways through dredging and that cannot be done on our own because it requires large resources,’ he said adding that India had proposed Bangladesh to jointly request the World Bank to fund dredging activities.

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