The Rickshawala mama driving me home from the office last week had been a garments worker until a few months ago. The factory in Gazipur stopped paying him, and he kept working as leaving meant forfeiting what he was owed. When the wages did not come, he came to Dhaka.
He needed income immediately, and a battery rickshaw could be rented in the morning and earn by evening. The garage did not ask for a licence, experience or deposit. He has driven it since and has never owned it.
He mentioned the garage twice and never the garage owner, which describes the relationship accurately. The garage owner bought the rickshaw, financed the battery, wired the shed and decided whether there is a meter on that wire. He also set the daily rent which the driver cannot negotiate.
Given that 79 percent of Dhaka's battery rickshaw drivers rent the vehicle from a garage, as Innovision Consulting found in its 2025 survey of 384 drivers, should the government be forming a policy that targets the drivers who merely rent it? The policy announced on 30 August does exactly that.
As the Dhaka Tribune reported on 17 and 30 August, the draft now with the Law Ministry provides for the following.
Battery rickshaws will be barred from Dhaka's main roads.
Rickshaws will be confined to one of eight colour-coded zones.
Registration will require an annual fitness certificate and geofencing.
A rickshaw charged from any source other than solar power will neither be registered nor have its registration renewed.
All of these will be enforced against the man in the driver's seat. The garage owner is absent from the draft.
Innovision's study surveyed 384 drivers, 392 passengers and 63 garage owners across twelve areas of Dhaka. In all three groups, the driver is the most visible figure in this sector and the least able to change anything about it.
The driver cannot register a rickshaw he cannot afford to own. A pedal rickshaw costs BDT 3,000 to 15,000, which a driver could save for. A battery rickshaw costs BDT 35,000 to 200,000, and 59.7 percent of owners surveyed borrowed to buy one. As a result, 35 percent of pedal rickshaw drivers own their vehicle; only 21 percent of battery rickshaw drivers do. The garages own the rest.
The driver has no margin for new cost. A rented battery rickshaw earns BDT 832 a day, of which the driver keeps BDT 418 and the garage takes BDT 414. A driver on a rented pedal rickshaw ends the day with more, BDT 484, as his rent is roughly a third as much.
The state cannot see the vehicles it intends to regulate. 97.4 percent of battery rickshaws surveyed were unregistered and charging at unmetered sheds. The electricity concern is fair: the Power Development Board chairman told Bonik Barta on 14 August that demand should fall by 1,000 to 1,500 megawatts after midnight and does not. But gas plants that can produce 12,200 megawatts are producing at most 5,200 (Prothom Alo, April). The electricity is consumed and simply not billed.
The garage owner cannot pay for solar and will not try. A garage of 15 rickshaws, each drawing four to nine units a day, needs roughly 25 kilowatts of solar, which at BDT 75 to 110 per watt (Fakir Technologies, 2026) costs BDT 1.9 to 2.8 million. The consumption figure is Innovision's estimate, but the bill is thirty to forty-five times the BDT 62,230 these men paid to convert a rickshaw, and 86 percent have no other business to fall back on. They will stay unregistered.
If the garages are made to pay, the garage raises the rent, the driver raises the fare, and the passenger pays. Rickshaw use is heaviest among households earning BDT 20,001 to 30,000 a month and falls sharply above that. A cost pushed down this chain breaks it at the lowest point.
The public is not asking for a ban. 79 percent of passengers surveyed want stricter regulation, but only 21.9 percent want battery rickshaws removed. The mandate exists; what is missing is a design the sector can survive.
Treat this as one crisis, not four. The battery rickshaw is an energy, traffic, road safety and employment problem at once, each under a different authority; solve one alone and it returns as another.
Finance solar in instalments, and legislate who pays. Microfinance institutions already finance these conversions and can spread the cost across years, paired with a legal bar on passing it into the daily rent.
Police the enforcers, not only the drivers. 23.8 percent of garage owners surveyed named police-related restrictions as a main problem, and formalisation without oversight turns an unregistered vehicle into a payable offence.
Count the garages first. Nobody knows how many there are or how much electricity they draw, and every provision in the draft depends on that.
Cap new entry, and fix the jobs people are leaving. 59.9 percent of battery rickshaw drivers surveyed have been in the trade for under two years. They took a rickshaw because a job stopped paying.
The draft policy has nothing the man who drove me home can comply with. He owns neither the rickshaw nor the shed, so he can neither register the one nor meter the other. But the rickshaw he rents has an owner who holds the battery, the wire and the rent. Dhaka has spent four years regulating the man in the seat and leaving the man with the wire alone. We can point these rules at the person able to follow them, or write another version in two years and wonder why the queue outside the garage never got shorter.
Sources: Dhaka Tribune; Bonik Barta; Prothom Alo (2026); Bangladesh Power Development Board; Innovision Consulting, Urban Mobility Study in Dhaka: Rickshaws in Transition (2026).
Access the Urban Mobility Study in Dhaka: Rickshaws in Transition (2026) Report here: Click Here
Author: Afifa Mahjabeen, an Associate in the Business Development and Communications team at Innovision Consulting
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