Battery Rickshaws: Illegal, Congesting, and Draining the Grid
The frustration has reached the planned neighbourhoods. On 28 August, residents of Gulshan, Banani, Baridhara and Niketan gathered at Gulshan-2, organised by the Gulshan Society, and issued a five-point demand: only licensed auto-rickshaws on the roads, restricted movement on main and high-risk routes, regular enforcement of traffic law, safe alternative public transport, and alternative livelihoods for drivers.
Speakers called the unlicensed vehicles a daily threat to safety and a sign that rules bind only those who already follow them.
Earlier local drives in the same area collapsed when drivers protested and the vehicles returned by afternoon.
The next day, the pressure reached the highest level. On 29 August, Prime Minister Tarique Rahman chaired a high-level meeting at his Tejgaon office and directed the authorities to formulate a separate policy to regulate auto-rickshaw movement in the capital.
The same meeting ordered Fulbaria bus terminal shifted to Keraniganj, the Karwan Bazar kitchen market moved to Gabtoli, and electronic toll collection launched on expressways and flyovers within four months.
It is the clearest signal yet that the government wants to manage the fleet rather than simply seize a few hundred vehicles.
But it also proves the article’s central point: even a prime minister’s directive lands as another policy on paper while the illegal fleet keeps charging off the grid at night.
That alarm is justified. Dhaka’s roads were never built for this. The city proper holds around ten million people, and battery-powered three-wheelers – the so-called “Bangla Teslas” – have flooded the streets in numbers no one can count precisely, estimates running from one to two million across the capital region.
Most are assembled in local workshops, unregistered, uninsured, and unlicensed. They are, in legal terms, illegal vehicles operating in plain sight.
That illegality is the first problem. A High Court ban on battery-run rickshaws has existed for years. Import restrictions were imposed. Policies were drafted and redrafted. None of it stuck.
Every government that tried a hard crackdown – the previous administration, and the present one after August 2024 – faced the same wall: drivers blocked roads, unions threatened strikes, and the order was quietly walked back.
Seizure drives remove a few hundred vehicles while hundreds more roll out of workshops the same week. The gap between removal and replacement is permanent.
The political reason is simple and brutal. The sector employs millions of people nationwide – drivers, battery traders, garage owners, workshop assemblers.
A sudden removal would throw that workforce onto the street overnight. In a city where formal jobs are scarce, that is not a policy failure; it is a social explosion waiting to happen.
Crime would rise, protests would spread, and no government has been willing to absorb that cost. So they manage the symptoms instead of the cause – a few seizures here, a few announcements there – and the fleet keeps growing.
The congestion is the visible cost. These vehicles compete with buses, cars, CNGs and motorcycles for every metre of carriageway on roads designed for a fraction of today’s traffic. Accidents have become routine.
The electricity crisis is the hidden cost, and it is worse. Most rickshaws charge for five to seven hours at night from four to six lead-acid batteries.
Dhaka Metropolitan Police have counted over 48,000 illegal charging points and nearly a thousand garages across eight police divisions – against roughly 3,300 approved stations. The legal connections draw about 10 megawatts.
The rest is stolen: residential meters, bypassed lines, streetlight circuits, direct hooks on poles. Garages charge 20 to 30 vehicles at once on wiring never built for it.
That invisible load – estimated at 500 to 800 megawatts nationally, 500 to 600 in Dhaka alone – hits the grid in the exact hours when households and industry need power most.
It lands on a system already short of gas, with load-shedding running into the thousands of megawatts after midnight. Transformers overheat, voltage drops, fires start from exposed cables.
The annual revenue loss is put at around Tk 4,000 crore. Calling these vehicles “green” is misleading when their charge comes from gas- and oil-fired power taken without payment.
Even if a government summoned the will to manage the fleet – registration, designated zones, metered charging – the employment question would remain. Millions of livelihoods depend on this informal economy.
Without a credible plan to absorb those workers into formal jobs, any serious crackdown risks exactly what governments fear: mass unemployment feeding into crime.
That is the trap. The rickshaws are illegal, they congest the roads, they drain the grid, and they cannot simply be removed without creating a crisis of their own.
The deeper failure is structural. Dhaka’s population has outgrown its roads and its power system at the same time, and no administration has built the mass transit or the formal jobs that would make the informal fleet unnecessary.
Until that changes, the streets will stay gridlocked and the grid will stay dark – and the illegal rickshaws will keep running, because for millions of people, they are the only option that works.
