Introducing e-tickets in transport sector

In this age of globalisation, no country can remain immune from its spill-over effects. National boundaries are now crossed without any visa: the Information Communication Technology (ICT) has done it! Bangladesh is no exception to the development. While mobile phones are now with people even at the lowest rung of society, internet is becoming popular in the country, thanks to IT-friendly policies of the present and past governments. Now tender documents could be downloaded at home and in offices while those, too, could be submitted electronically, doing away with musclemen and the vested groups who are usually out to grab those.
Air passengers now hold no five or six-page paper tickets any more to enter airports or board planes: one piece of downloaded paper serves the purpose. Today, air passengers buy e-tickets easily but it took a long time to reach this stage. Southwest Airlines of the US is credited with offering the first e-tickets for passengers in 1994. By the summer of 1999, the aviation industry in the USA reported half of all its tickets sold in the form of 'paperless' or e-tickets, mirroring the public's growing comfort with internet. The Biman and the Bangladesh Railway have successfully followed the US example.
However, other modes of the transport sector in the country are yet to follow, as the FE reported last Saturday, e-ticketing system. It has only been introduced on a limited scale in air-conditioned state-run BRTC buses. But then other BRTC buses could not do it because those are leased to the private sector operators. And the private sector transports still are highly anarchic as most of their owners cannot still be called real 'transport entrepreneurs'. A substantial portion of fares go unaccounted for. So transport owners prefer to get a fixed amount daily instead of getting cheated by operators of their vehicles.  Even most of the buses which introduced ticketing system through counters in several places on a city route have now dropped ticketing system. This is because ticketless passengers boarding buses often outnumber those with tickets. Against this backdrop, the idea of full introduction of e-tickets in transport sector in the immediate future looks outlandish.           
For a successful e-ticketing system, the transport sector needs to be strictly regulated by the ministry of communications. As the sole authority, it can impose a tough provision making the issuance of e-ticket mandatory for transport owners to comply with. Long-distance buses have, of late, started issuing e-tickets. However, the usual practice on the part of some sections among the owners of transports has to be changed first. In the face of an anarchic situation, the educated segment of transport owners is often seen selling out their vehicles at least to retain their hard-earned investment money. The e-ticketing system will help owners get due returns from their investment as it will eliminate pilferage of earnings. But then the system has to be introduced gradually and cautiously, not all on a sudden in order to avoid a backlash from workers and drivers. After all, hundreds of thousands of illiterate transport workers, employed in different public transports, will have to be replaced with a fewer number of literate employees.