Benapole traffic stoppage, passport passengers suffer

A week ago, a meeting was held with the Deputy Commissioner of Jessore, local stakeholders and transport officials to resolve the traffic jam. In that meeting, it was decided that all the transport buses or local buses that leave from Benapole check post and Benapole Bazar to various district towns of the country including Benapole-Jessore-Dhaka will now leave from the municipal bus terminal, four kilometers away from Benapole Bazar. Passengers of the transport buses that left from Dhaka at night will be dropped off at the Benapole check post in the morning and those buses will go back to the terminal.

Suddenly, on Friday (November 22), at around 3 am, passengers of transport buses coming from different parts of the country were forcibly dropped off at the terminal, causing harassment. Due to such a decision of the administration without informing anything, the Benapole Bus Owners Association has stopped all types of traffic.

A few passport passengers complained that a passenger terminal has been built along with immigration for the convenience of passengers in neighboring Petrapole, India, but the terminal operating at the border in Bangladesh is being closed and passengers are being sent to a terminal located 4 kilometers away. Passport passengers are suffering greatly due to this.

Passport passenger Mehedi Hasan said that he came from Dhaka and got off the bus at the municipal terminal, 4 kilometers away from the border, at 3 am. Later, after sitting at a tea shop for 2 hours, he came to the border in the morning with an easy bike. A passport holder takes money from a Bangladesh land port passenger to use the port. So what service did the port provide us? We want the buses to operate from the land port bus terminal located at the check post.

In this regard, the president of the Transport Association, Bablur Rahman Babu, said that a few days ago, a meeting was held with the Jessore District Commissioner, us and the local civil society. The meeting discussed the traffic jam and directed all the transport buses to be moved from the checkpost terminal to the Kagojpukur terminal, 4 kilometers from Benapole, and the administration instructed the vehicles to leave from there.

As per the decision, the buses leaving Dhaka at night were dropping off the passengers at the Benapole checkpost and going to the municipal bus terminal for Kagojpukur. We were leaving the buses that did not have a day trip from the Benapole checkpost and Benapole Bazar between 8 pm and 8 am, and the rest of the vehicles were being dropped off from the terminal throughout the day.

Suddenly, at around 3 am on Friday, after the buses coming from different parts of the country arrived, the passengers of all the buses were forcibly dropped off at the terminal. At that time, the passengers suffered from insecurity and were harassed. Later, the people of the municipal council at the terminal sent those passengers to the checkpost in local buses.
Now our point is that if local vehicles can go to the check post, then why can't our transport buses drop passengers at the check post? Our transport buses do not create any traffic jams or unnecessarily block traffic by standing on the road. Then why is the administration treating us in this way? In protest against such behavior of the administration, the Transport Owners Association did not leave any vehicle for Benapole from Dhaka last night and the owners' association has stopped all types of transport buses and long-distance buses from Benapole.