Good riddance

Published On: December 19, 2016 12:35 AM NPT By: Republica  | @RepublicaNepal


Transport syndicates 
Some might wonder about the significance of the Supreme Court mandamus order last Thursday asking the government to take necessary steps to end the reign of transport syndicates. That is because it has twice before given pretty much the same directive to the government, the first one a decade ago, followed by a second one two years later. But Thursday’s verdict is different. For the first time the Supreme Court will be also monitoring the government’s progress (or lack thereof) in implementing its verdict. Instead of issuing a generic order to end all transport syndicates, as happened the first two times, this time it has ordered the government to form a high-level committee to study the effects of syndicates on transport fares, on route permits and on road accidents. The committee will after the study recommend ways to abolish syndicates, and the recommendations will be binding. Additionally, to ensure that its order this time doesn’t fall on deaf ears, the government has been asked to submit periodic progress reports to the apex court’s Judgment Execution Directorate, which monitors the implementation of court orders. It appears that after ruling Nepali roads for decades the days of syndicates are truly numbered. 

No one will miss them. Not only have transport syndicates artificially inflated public transport fares.

As the apex court’s verdict suggests, they were also responsible for a disproportionate number of accidents. According to traffic police, around 1,800 Nepalis die on roads every year; nearly half of them are killed due to the poor condition of the buses and microbuses run by syndicates. Since these syndicates have monopoly over road transport on all important long-routes, and hence face no competition, they often operate cheap old vehicles in order to maximize profits. Thousands of people have paid with their lives for this single-minded pursuit of profits of transport entrepreneurs. Such accidents are economically costly, too, resulting in around Rs 4 billion a year in losses. The Supreme Court is bang on when it says that in a free-market economy it is illegal to constrain people’s choices by rigging the public transport system in favor of a handful of syndicates that could not care less about passenger comfort and safety. 

But there will surely be a strong pushback. The reason previous court verdicts were ignored is that these transport syndicates are politically well connected. Whenever vital reforms have been tried they have been able to successfully leverage these political channels to resist change. This time as well, as the government was preparing to amend laws to end syndicates (even before the latest court verdict) there was tremendous pressure on the government from syndicate operators not to cut down on their unearned privileges. The Supreme Court verdict should ease some of this pressure, as the political actors in government can now simply say to syndicate operators close to them that their hands are tied. Buy if the government still dilly-dallies, the Supreme Court should expose those who are knowingly putting people’s lives at risk and bring them under the purview of the law. Likewise, following this landmark apex court verdict to remove the old syndicates on our roads, the next course of action, for the executive as well as the judiciary, must be to try to dismantle growing cartelling in the aviation sector. 

 


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