Editorial
Toll collection larceny
The whole system needs reworking
The Anti-Corruption Commission's probes into institutional corruption have hit the road -- for a change. How strange are the ways of corruption and how pervasively addictive it became that a habitually corrupt minion when moved away from his coin-jingling job to sit by the river side to count waves improvised a way out to fleece money anyway! He asked fees from passing boatmen for breaking waves, as the proverbial story goes.
Horrific findings about wrong-doings on the road have come to light. Not by extortionist forays by private thugs we had been plentifully familiar with, much to our chagrin as highway robbery of the worst kind that pushed the prices high and the economy into the throes of disaster but at the Roads and Highways Department (RHD)-run toll collection centres. Along the Tongi-Ashulia highway and Meghna and Meghna-Gumti bridge, the state coffer had been cheated of Tk 186 crore between 2002 and 2006.
This is the sample of corruption in the two authorised toll collection centres alone; what must be the total scale of pilferage when all the collection centres are put together and closely audited.
All that money was embezzled in too brazen-faced a manner to have escaped any casual supervision. Road users were given fake money receipts or no receipts at all. Staff members of the private firm in charge of computerised toll operation and maintenance of Meghna and Meghna-Gumti bridge would have no compunction in deleting toll data and even keeping the systems shut sometimes to let the RHD staff misappropriate money. So, the nexus between the RHD officials and the private company is too obvious to miss. The records and circumstantial evidence wouldn't be difficult to obtain. We want exemplary punishment meted out to the culprits and all holes in the system plugged. It is not enough to catch the offenders and punish them, although that by itself would be a headway made against corruption. What is equally, if not more important, is to streamline the entire toll collection system and ensure that government coffers receive the revenues it has laid the service infrastructure for.
One measure of the sense of loss comes from the fact that toll collection has soar to 4.93 lakh from 1.49 lakh a day. May be the figures can be bettered.
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