Update, October 2026 — The grievance behind this protest has a regulatory explanation that was rarely stated at the time: the overwhelming majority of motorcycles carrying ride-share passengers were never authorised to do so. Why riders kept being stopped is below the original article.
DRDU General Secretary Belal Ahmed confirmed the matter, according to a report.
Referring to a recent incident of a driver setting his own motorcycle on fire in Badda, Belal Ahmed said, "This is very tragic that a driver had to torch his own motorcycle because of police harassment."
"We have previously informed the authorities about our problems several times, yet no action was taken to resolve the issues," he said.
The protesters' six-point demands include recognition of ridesharing workers and setting a 10% commission on all types of rides.
The workers demanded an end to all kinds of police harassment and asked the authorities to refrain from rendering drivers unemployed on fake charges or excuses.
The protesters also sought designated parking space for ride-sharing vehicles in Dhaka and Sylhet and no advance income tax (AIT) on all registered ride-sharing vehicles.
They demanded all ride-sharing vehicles that were AIT listed last year and were seized by police for non-payment of AIT should be returned to their owners.
Earlier, a driver of a ride-sharing platform has set his own motorcycle on fire to protest what he said police harassment.
The video of the incident that took place on the Badda Link Road area in the capital on Monday morning, when a ride-sharing driver set his motorcycle on fire, has gone viral on social media sites.
In the video, the driver was venting his anger when police stopped him and asked for vehicle documents for breaching traffic rules. The rider got agitated in a heated argument with the police and ended up setting his bike on fire.
Background
Ride-sharing arrived in Dhaka in 2016 with Uber and Pathao, and by 2021 the BRTA's Ride Sharing Service Guidelines required every vehicle to be enlisted and every driver to hold a professional licence, while traffic police treated motorcycles waiting for a booking as an obstruction. The Badda incident that triggered the strike, a driver setting fire to his own motorcycle after a police fine, spread on Facebook within hours.
What happened next
Updated September 2026. The strike went ahead on Tuesday, 28 September 2021, thinning app-based rides across Dhaka for a day, and the police promised to look into "harassment" without changing the rules. The core demands have been repeated at every protest since: recognition of drivers as workers, a cap on platform commission, designated waiting points, and an end to advance income tax on ride-sharing vehicles. None has been fully met. The platforms did lower commission on some ride types in 2022, and the BRTA opened enlistment to more vehicles, but the waiting-point problem that produced the Badda fire remains unsolved, and drivers still work without insurance or minimum earnings.
Why riders kept being stopped
Ride-sharing in Bangladesh operates under the Ridesharing Service Policy 2017. A company must hold a Ridesharing Service Provider Enlistment Certificate from the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority, and an individual rider is supposed to hold a registration card obtained through that company.
The gap between that framework and the street is the whole story. Only around 1,156 motorcycles were authorised to carry passengers under ride-sharing rules, and the service was permitted only in Dhaka, Gazipur, Narayanganj, Munshiganj, Narsingdi and Manikganj. Tens of thousands of riders were working on the apps.
So a rider stopped by police was, in the large majority of cases, formally unauthorised — not because they had done anything a reasonable person would call wrong, but because the registration route existed on paper and had barely been used. The companies themselves were in the same position: operators could not be held to the approved guidelines because many had not completed BRTA registration, which left the regulator unable to enforce rules it had written.
The incentive nobody fixed
One detail from the enforcement side explains a lot of the friction. Riders routinely switch the app off and negotiate a contract fare directly, keeping the whole amount instead of the platform's share.
For the rider that is a rational response to thin margins. For everyone else it removes the thing that made app-based transport different: with the app off there is no trip record, no identified driver, no fare receipt and no insurance trail. Police noted that offenders would be far easier to identify if riders kept their apps running.
The pattern is not local. Ride-hailing regulation everywhere assumes the platform is the point of accountability — that the app knows who drove whom, when and for how much. A regulatory regime that makes operating on the app expensive or legally precarious pushes riders off it, and in doing so destroys the record the regulation depends on.
Where it stands
Enforcement has remained the weak point rather than the rules. Guidelines exist; registration of both companies and riders has lagged; and the sector has continued to run largely on an informal basis that satisfies neither the riders protesting here nor the authorities stopping them.
