Businesspeople demand tax cut on dredgers

Business leaders urged the government to make the waterways of the country sustainable through proper dredging as river routes are cost-effective, environment-friendly and have great economic potentials.

Business leaders said the call in a webinar titled “Sustainable River Dredging: Challenges and Way Forward” organised by the Dhaka Chamber of Commerce and Industry (DCCI) on Saturday.

“It is important to monitor the execution of both capital and maintenance dredging through a real-time monitoring system,” said DCCI President Rizwan Rahman.

Bangladesh once had 24,000 km first-class waterways which dwindle down to 6,000 km in monsoon and 3,600 km… and it affects the economic and ecological state of the country, the DCCI president said.

“To ensure sustainable development of waterways, the national budget has to rationalise import duty, VAT and AIT on dredging machineries and bring river dredging programme into Fast-track development projects” Rizwan added.

“Private and foreign investors need to be encouraged with more fiscal and policy incentives for bringing state-of-the-art technology here,” he said further.

“Government is relentlessly working on sustainable river dredging both in the form of capital dredging and maintenance dredging and 35 more dredgers will be procured soon,” said Khalid Mahmud Chowdhury, state minister for shipping.

“As per the delta plan, the government is firmly committed to develop the riverine system in the country and to materialise the plan, he invited the private sector to come forward with more investments even in the PPP format,” he said.

Former FBCCI President Md Shafiul Islam MP urged upon to create better coordination among the stakeholders like BIWTA, Water Development Board, ministry and the private sector.

“Unplanned dredging may kill rivers,” he said.

Ainun Nishat, Professor Emeritus, BRAC University presented the keynote paper.

“Private sector can play a major role in dredging operation. The current practice of dredging operations, both capital and maintenance, needs to be evaluated, urgently. To create skilled manpower, he urged for establishing a river training institute. The PPP can be a useful model for river dredging, sand extraction, land recovery, land accretion and land reclamation,” Nishat said.

“We need 500 dredgers but we have 150-156 dredgers in hand,” informed Kabir Bin Anwar, senior secretary, Ministry of Water Resources.

“Inland water transport tariffs on cargo are below Tk 1 per ton-km whereas for the road it is Tk 4.5 per ton-km. For cargo freight movement in Bangladesh, the road is used by 80 per cent whereas waterways are used by only 16 per cent. For better maximum use of the waterways, he suggested allocating at least 1.5 per cent of GDP in the budget which is 0.4 per cent right at this moment,” Commodore Golam Sadeque, Chairman BIWTA said.

DCCI Senior Vice President N K A Mobin, DCCI Director Khairul Majid Mahmud, Managing Director of Energypac Ltd and DCCI Convener Nurul Akter also spoke on the occasion.