Drive to Dhaka

Offering “pushpanjali“ on “Ashtami“ at the famous Dhakeshwari temple or watching the famed “sandhya-aarati“ on “Navami“ there this year will be just a five-and-half hour car ride away for Kolkatans.
All one will have to do is to drive his car up to Benapole-Petrapole, obtain a visa on the spot and quickly complete some formalities before driving into Bangladesh to reach Dhaka or some other cities. One can even drive up through Bangladesh to Meghalaya and Tripura. Citizens of Bangladesh, Bhutan, India and Nepal (BBIN) will be able to drive in their own private vehicles through designated border points into each other's countries by September this year. Transport ministers of the four countries will meet in Thimpu next Monday to sign the BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement that will allow personal, passenger and cargo vehicles of these countries seamless travel across each other's borders.
New Delhi on Wednesday approved signing of this agreement by road transport minister Nitin Gadkari, who will travel to Thimpu on June 14 when the transport secretaries of the four countries will tie up all loose ends of the proposed agreement.
Union transport secretary Vijay Chibber said that once the agreement is signed, the four countries will form their own committees to work out the details such as taxes, levies and routes plans.“We will finish this process within a couple of months. Then we will meet again to finalize the protocol for travel between the four countries. Initially, the four countries are likely to put a cap on the number of cargo or private vehicles that can cross over their borders. There could also be a list of places that cannot be visited,“ he said.
“A major objective here is to promote tourism and sub-regional integration through greater and more intensive people-to-people contacts, apart from making transportation of goods easier and faster. Hence, taxes and entry fees won't be steep,“ he explained. At present, Indian cars and SUVs can cross over into Nepal and Bhutan, but not Bangladesh, for a day or more on payment of nominal duties. Nepal levies a duty of about Rs.300 per Indian car or SUV for each day's stay in that country while Bhutan takes a much lower Rs.190 per car or SUV for a week-long permit. The rates for Indian cars and SUVs entering Bangladesh would also be nominal, said sources.
All the four countries will also upgrade the designated roads that the vehicles will be allowed to take.Hence, travel time between Kolkata and Dhaka, said Bangladesh transport minister Obaidul Quader, would get reduced to about 5.5 hours instead of nearly ten hours that it takes now .
The BBIN Motor Vehicles Agreement requires all the signatories to ease red-tape and cut down on formalities at the borders. The travel time between Dhaka and Sylhet along the designated `BBIN route' would also get reduced by at least an hour to four hours.
From Sylhet, an Indian car can cross the Indo-Bangla border through Tamabil and enter Dawki in Meghalaya to reach Shillong in just two hours and onward to Guwahati in another 2.5 hours. Now, one will be able to reach Shillong from Kolkata via Bangladesh in a cool 12 hours, instead of the minimum 26 hours that it now takes to go via Siliguri and the “chicken's neck corridor“.
The agreement will also boost trade since trans-shipment will no longer be required. This European Union-style road connectivity between SAARC countries was proposed by Prime Minister Narendra Modi during the SAARC summit at Kathmandu in November last year, but the idea was vetoed by Pakistan.The four sub-regional countries then decided to go ahead on their own and chart this connectivity .