Reverse Gear for Tajik Bus Drivers
The withdrawal of licenses from private minibus operators in the Tajik capital Dushanbe has deprived some 6,000 drivers of a living.
Reverse Gear for Tajik Bus Drivers
The withdrawal of licenses from private minibus operators in the Tajik capital Dushanbe has deprived some 6,000 drivers of a living.
IWPR freelancer Khurshed Durakhsh reported on the banning of Chinese-made minibuses which have filled a gap in the city’s public transport network in recent years. The authorities plan to replace them with better vehicles made in South Korea, but these will mainly be operated by state-run transport companies rather than privateers.
“I bought my vehicle six months ago and it hasn’t broken even yet,” said Jahongir Abdulloev. “I paid 5,700 [US] dollars for it, after earning the money in Russia…. I was counting on earning money from it to live. And now they’re being banned.”
The municipal authorities say too many private drivers fail to apply for operating licenses and do not keep to the fixed routes they are supposed to follow. They also blame the minibuses for numerous accidents in Dushanbe. Finally, there is a government standards ruling that seven-seat vehicles like the Chinese buses do not qualify as public transport.
“What harm are we doing?” asked another driver Mutrib Umarov. “If they wanted to ban them, why did them to be imported? Lot of them were brought in. They should have thought of that earlier.”
For more on this story, see IWPR’s recent story Tajik Minibuses Driven to Destruction.
The audio programme, in Russian and Tajik, went out on national radio stations in Tajikistan, as part of IWPR project work funded by the Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs.
