Illegal toll collection by a section of port employees continues unabated at Forest Ghat on the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel. Though the Mongla Port Authority has no provision for collection of fees at the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel, some port employees were seen collecting toll from motorised and traditional boats.
A visit to the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel by this correspondent on Sunday revealed that one Jahangir and his associate Kabir were charging different boats anything between Tk. 200 and Tk. 300 without giving any receipts.
Jahangir claimed himself to be a toll collector of the Mongla Port Authority.
It is also alleged that some members of the Bangladesh Inland Water Transport Authority (BIWTA) are also involved in this unauthorised toll collection from small cargo boats.
Kabir, a boatman engaged in the collection of fees from local boats on the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel, said, “I am working and collecting money on behalf of Jahangir.”
“We are collecting toll on behalf of the port authority. I am a collector of the port,” Jahangir told this correspondent.
Jahangir did not reply when asked why he was collecting money without giving any receipts. He was also unable to produce any legal receipt book.
“Money is not supposed to be collected in the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel. I will look into the matter,” Kazi Faizur Rahman, director (admin) of the Mongla Port Authority, told The Independent.
No one can collect money without giving receipt, he added.
“Yes, I know Jahangir; he is our staff. The allegation will be probed and action will be taken, if found guilty,” Rahman said.
When contacted, Shafiqul Islam, director (port) of the BIWTA, said he had no knowledge of the unauthorised practice.
He, too, said no employee was posted there to collect money. “If anybody is involved in collecting money posing as a BIWTA staff, he should be handed over to police,” he added.
According to BIWTA sources, about 100 small motorised and local boats daily ply on the Mongla-Ghashiakhali channel. The BIWTA has dredged the 22-km-long channel at a cost of Tk. 200 crore.
Prime Minister Sheikh Hasina formally opened the waterway for cargo movement in October 27 last year, though the BIWTA opened it on May 6, 2015, for the plying of eight-feet draft cargo vessels
on a trial basis. About 54,000 vessels have crossed the channel since May 2015 until now. The government has expedited the channel’s dredging work, after a tanker, OT Southern Star 7, carrying 357,668 litres of furnace oil, sank in the Shela near Mrigmari in the Sundarbans after being hit by a cargo vessel on December 9, 2014. The oil spill from the tanker is believed to have caused considerable damage to the Sundarbans, the world’s largest mangrove forest.