A Country Cannot Fine Its Way to Order

A mature state is not one that eliminates every grey area. It is one that knows how to govern grey areas without allowing them to become impunity.

A water tanker in Gujarat

Years ago, while studying for a master’s degree at the University of Sheffield, I took a course that examined infrastructure not only as an engineering problem but also as a social and political one. One class led by Steve Connelly has stayed with me. He showed an image from the dry Indian state of Gujarat: a freight train carrying water in tanker wagons, stopped while local people took water from it.

The immediate legal description is easy. The water belonged to someone else. Taking it without permission could be called theft. The more difficult question was the one put to the class: should water taken for survival be understood in exactly the same moral category as property taken for commercial gain?

That question is not an argument that necessity automatically erases law. It is an argument that public policy cannot stop at legal classification. Water is indispensable to life. The United Nations recognises access to safe and clean drinking water and sanitation as a human right, with accessibility and affordability among its core elements.[3] If people must break a rule to obtain an essential condition of survival, the state has two problems, not one. It has the immediate breach of law and the institutional failure that made the breach rational.

This is why technically sound policy can fail. An engineer can calculate the correct pipe diameter, a transport planner can specify a safe vehicle standard, and a lawyer can draft a perfectly coherent prohibition. None of those interventions will work for long if the social system gives people strong reasons to bypass them.

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Photo: Saqlain Rizve; Source: The Business Standard

The law is clear. Life is not.

There is a particular instinct in Bangladesh’s public debate, especially among sections of the educated middle and upper classes, to respond to disorder with a new prohibition, a larger fine or another enforcement drive. Traffic is chaotic, increase the penalty. Buildings breach rules, demolish them. Battery rickshaws are unsafe, ban them. Street vendors obstruct footways, evict them. Informal settlements do not comply with planning standards, clear them.

Law matters. A functioning society cannot treat road safety, building standards or property rights as optional. The mistake is to assume that non-compliance is primarily a shortage of punishment. Often it is evidence of a deeper mismatch between formal rules and the material conditions in which people live.

The distinction matters because enforcement has a moral and practical hierarchy. A child placed in an adult economic role by family illness is not equivalent to a professional operator deliberately evading safety rules for profit. A household building incrementally because formal housing is unaffordable is not equivalent to a developer knowingly adding unlawful floors to maximise returns. Good government distinguishes vulnerability from exploitation, necessity from convenience, and transitional informality from deliberate abuse.

That is what proportionality means in practice. It does not require the state to abandon rules. It requires the state to understand the person standing in front of the rule.

The social contract is not a legal technicality

It is tempting to put the argument dramatically: a state that cannot take responsibility for its people cannot demand that they obey its laws. Literally, that is too broad. States do not lose all legal authority whenever welfare provision is inadequate. A driver cannot defend reckless conduct simply by pointing to failures in public healthcare.

But as a political proposition, the argument contains an important truth. Sustainable compliance depends on more than coercion. Citizens are more likely to accept rules when they believe institutions are broadly reciprocal, procedures are fair, burdens are proportionate and public authority has some connection to their lived circumstances.

Where that relationship collapses, everyday rule-breaking can become more than opportunism. It becomes a form of practical disengagement from the state. People do not necessarily declare rebellion. They simply stop treating formal rules as morally binding whenever enforcement is absent. The building is extended first and regularised later. The shop spills onto the footway. The bus stops anywhere. The rickshaw enters a prohibited road. The wetland is filled because everyone assumes someone with influence will eventually obtain an exception.

This is one of Bangladesh’s most damaging governance cycles. Rules are drafted ambitiously, compliance is low, enforcement is selective, public trust falls, and government responds with another rule or a larger fine. The law becomes simultaneously severe on paper and negotiable in practice.

The easy-bike problem is already proving the point

Battery-powered rickshaws are a useful case study because the state has spent years trying to fit a mass livelihood and transport system into a regulatory framework that did not properly recognise it. Court restrictions and attempted bans did not make the vehicles disappear. Their numbers grew because they answered real demands: cheap short-distance mobility, access in areas poorly served by formal public transport, and employment for large numbers of low-income workers.

By 2025, the policy direction had begun to change. Officials moved towards a regulatory framework for low-speed e-rickshaws, driver training, e-registration and a safer model developed with Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology. Reporting at the time acknowledged that existing battery rickshaws lacked registration and formal driver training, but also that repeated attempts to remove them had failed.[2] A later legal analysis in The Daily Star made the underlying point explicitly: blanket eradication was unrealistic while the public remained dependent on the vehicles, partly because accessible and convenient formal transport was insufficient.[4]

This is precisely what humane regulation looks like when it begins to learn from reality. The answer is not to pretend unsafe vehicles are acceptable. It is to create a route from informality to legality: safer design, training, designated routes, registration, transition periods, finance for replacement vehicles and enforcement targeted at genuinely dangerous behaviour.

The same principle should apply to the 11-year-old. Protect the child, investigate the theft, address the household’s immediate vulnerability and prevent the circumstances from recurring. A fine imposed on a family whose breadwinner is incapacitated may satisfy the formal rule while worsening the very desperation that produced the breach.

Bangladesh plans the city it wants, not the city people live in

The same failure of reasoning appears at a much larger scale in urban planning. Bangladesh does not suffer from an absence of plans. Dhaka alone has gone through successive master plans, structure plans, transport strategies and Detailed Area Plans. The deeper problem is the distance between the formal city imagined by plans and the city produced by millions of daily decisions.

The World Bank has repeatedly described Dhaka’s growth as inadequately planned, congested and institutionally fragmented. Its 2018 work on Greater Dhaka argued that the city’s urbanisation had become “messy and uneven”, with infrastructure and land development poorly coordinated. Other World Bank work has identified a lack of local-level urban planning capacity as a cause of unplanned growth beyond the capital as well.[5]

That gap is visible everywhere. Formal planning assumes serviced plots, enforceable building controls, predictable transport networks, adequate drainage reservations and households able to participate in regulated land and housing markets. The real city includes informal settlements, unregistered vehicles, incremental construction, mixed home-based businesses, street commerce, subdivided plots, encroached canals and enormous populations whose livelihoods depend on uses that planning documents often regard as temporary or undesirable.

When planning treats those realities merely as violations, it misunderstands what informality is. Informality is often the market’s improvised answer to a missing formal system. A battery rickshaw may exist because there is no reliable feeder bus. A street vendor may exist because formal retail space is unaffordable and customers still need inexpensive food. An informal settlement may occupy risky land because legal housing close to employment is beyond a household’s income. An unapproved mixed use may flourish because rigid separation of uses does not reflect the economics of a dense South Asian neighbourhood.

None of this means that every informal outcome should be accepted. Wetland filling can increase flood risk. Unsafe buildings kill people. Unregulated vehicles can endanger pedestrians. The planning task is to distinguish what must be prohibited, what can be regularised, what needs redesign, and what requires the state to provide an alternative before enforcement becomes credible.

The failure is institutional as much as spatial

Dhaka’s problems are not only the product of individual rule-breaking. They are also created by fragmented public authority. Transport, land development, drainage, roads, housing, utilities and local government are divided among multiple agencies whose boundaries and incentives do not always align. World Bank analysis has highlighted fragmented institutional arrangements in Dhaka, while development partners have repeatedly linked weak urban governance to poor planning capacity and limited citizen participation.[6]

This helps explain why Bangladesh can simultaneously have detailed planning rules and deeply unplanned urban outcomes. A plan may reserve land for a road that the implementation agency cannot acquire. A drainage corridor may be identified but filled before enforcement arrives. A city corporation may be responsible for a local street while another body controls adjacent land and a third manages transport. Development control then becomes the most visible arm of planning because it is easier to issue a notice against an individual than to coordinate institutions.

The result is a planning culture that can become punitive at the bottom and negotiable at the top. Small householders and informal workers encounter licences, fines and eviction. Larger actors are better able to employ consultants, pursue amendments, seek political intervention or wait for rules to change. Concerns about repeated amendments to Dhaka’s Detailed Area Plan in response to development interests have been raised publicly by planning professionals, including the Bangladesh Institute of Planners.[7]

Once citizens perceive that rules are flexible for power but rigid for vulnerability, planning loses more than compliance. It loses legitimacy.

Consultation is not decoration

There is a recognisable caricature of policymaking in Bangladesh: a problem is identified by a small circle of professionals in Dhaka, discussed at a seminar or newspaper roundtable, converted into a proposal, and eventually emerges as a rule for millions of people who never entered the conversation. The caricature is exaggerated, but the criticism behind it is serious.

Bangladesh does have formal and project-based consultation. RAJUK itself states that the Detailed Area Plan should be prepared and implemented through community participation. Research on metropolitan planning, however, has repeatedly found a gap between the promise of participation and its reality, including top-down administration, weak public awareness and unequal access to decision-makers.[8]

The distinction is important. Public participation is not achieved merely by publishing a draft, inviting experts to a hotel conference or allowing written objections once the central choices have already been made. Meaningful participation begins when options are still open. It asks affected people how a problem actually works, who bears the cost of proposed solutions, what alternatives are feasible and what support is needed for compliance.

The United Kingdom is not a model of perfect democracy, and British consultations can be formulaic or dominated by organised interests. But the institutional principle is useful. Cabinet Office guidance says consultation should take place while policies are still at a formative stage, should consider the full range of affected groups, and should explain how responses informed the eventual policy.[9] English local plan-making also contains formal stages for community representations before independent examination. The point is not that Britain consults “hundreds of times” before every law. It is that consultation is treated as part of the legitimacy and evidence base of public decision-making rather than an optional courtesy.

Bangladesh’s newly approved National Urban Policy 2025 now uses similar language. It calls for decentralised urban growth, stronger local governance and meaningful citizen participation, alongside affordable housing, social protection for the urban poor and improved service delivery.[10] That is an important shift in official thinking. The test will be whether participation changes decisions or merely accompanies them.

The deeper problem is paternalism

The argument also has a social dimension that conventional political analysis often misses. Bangladesh’s public institutions operate within a society marked by strong hierarchies of status, education, class, profession and access to power. The credentialled citizen can easily begin to imagine that expertise gives him not only technical knowledge but a superior claim to decide how everyone else should live.

This is sometimes explained through Bengal’s religious history or through claims that contemporary authoritarian habits are a residue of Hindu caste society. That explanation is too communal and too simple. Bengal’s hierarchy was shaped by several overlapping systems: caste, zamindari landlordism, colonial bureaucracy, class, rural patronage and later party-state networks. These structures involved people across religious communities. The more defensible continuity is not “Hindu behaviour” surviving in a Muslim-majority society. It is the persistence of paternalism, the assumption that those with status may define the public interest for those without it.

That paternalism can coexist comfortably with a procedural version of democracy. Elections occur, seminars are held, committees are formed and consultation documents are published, but the acceptable range of outcomes remains defined by a relatively narrow professional and political class. Public preference is welcomed when it confirms elite judgement and described as ignorance, populism or lawlessness when it does not.

This is not an argument against expertise. A structural engineer should determine whether a building will stand. A transport engineer should analyse braking distances. An epidemiologist should advise on disease control. But technical authority and democratic authority are different things. Experts establish consequences and constraints. They should not quietly convert their expertise into a licence to decide whose inconvenience, livelihood or displacement is acceptable.

What humane planning would look like

A more effective Bangladeshi planning state would still make rules. In some areas it would enforce them more firmly than today. The difference would be the sequence.

First, diagnose before prohibiting. If battery rickshaws dominate a neighbourhood, map the trips they serve, the incomes they support, the roads on which they create danger and the formal transport gaps they are filling. If hawkers occupy a pavement, understand the pedestrian problem and the local retail economy before choosing eviction as the default response. If families build informally, examine land prices, tenure, plot standards and access to housing finance rather than treating every unauthorised structure as an isolated moral failure.

Second, design lawful pathways. Regulation works better when ordinary people have a realistic route into compliance. That may mean simplified permits, low-cost registration, approved standard designs, phased deadlines, microfinance, amnesties for minor historic breaches, serviced vending areas, incremental housing codes, or route-based licensing for low-speed vehicles.

Third, differentiate enforcement. Deliberate commercial abuse, corruption, dangerous construction and environmental destruction should attract serious sanctions. Poverty-driven technical breaches should trigger support and transition before punishment wherever safety permits. The principle is not softness. It is proportionality.

Fourth, move participation upstream. Residents, drivers, vendors, women, disabled people, low-income tenants, landowners, businesses and children should not appear only after a plan is drafted. Their knowledge should shape the definition of the problem itself. A planner who asks only whether people support a completed proposal has arrived too late.

Fifth, connect planning with welfare. Urban order cannot be separated from household economics. A family with no income support will find a livelihood somehow. A worker priced out of formal housing will live somewhere. A commuter without a bus will take another vehicle. If the legal option is structurally unavailable, enforcement merely rotates people between different forms of illegality.

Finally, judge plans by behaviour, not documents. The measure of a transport policy is not whether the regulation is elegantly written but whether people can move safely and affordably. The measure of a land-use plan is not how much of the map is coloured correctly but whether development actually follows it without creating mass exclusion. The measure of consultation is not the number of meetings held but whether citizens can identify where their participation changed the decision.

The 11-year-old is a planning question too

It may seem excessive to connect one child on an easy bike with the failure of urban planning. In fact, they belong to the same system.

The boy’s journey was produced by overlapping deficits: an ill parent, fragile household income, limited social protection, an informal transport economy, weak regulation, a market for low-cost mobility and a state whose most immediate relationship with that family may be the rule telling the child what he cannot do.

Urban planning is often taught as the arrangement of land, roads, buildings and infrastructure. At its best, it is something broader: the organisation of collective life under conditions of scarcity and competing rights. That requires engineering, law and economics, but also ethics. It requires asking not only whether an activity is permitted, but why it exists, who depends on it, who is harmed by it and what a lawful alternative would cost.

Bangladesh will not become orderly by normalising unsafe driving, illegal construction or encroachment. But neither will it become orderly by pretending that fines can substitute for functioning institutions. The state needs enough authority to enforce, enough capacity to provide, and enough humility to listen.

A successful state does not draw a single hard line between white and black and call everything outside it criminal. Nor does it dissolve every rule into sympathy. It creates carefully governed grey areas: discretion, transition, exemptions, support, negotiation and proportionate enforcement. Those are not weaknesses in the rule of law. Properly designed, they are what allow the rule of law to survive contact with human life.

That is the lesson of the stolen easy bike. It is also the lesson Bangladesh’s planners have been learning, slowly and expensively, from Dhaka’s streets for decades. A country cannot fine its way into legitimacy. It has to plan its way there.

Sources and notes:

1. Government of Bangladesh, Road Transport Act 2018, section 6. The statutory licensing provisions set a minimum age of 18 for a non-professional driving licence. Laws of Bangladesh: https://bdlaws.minlaw.gov.bd/act-1262/section-47858.html

2. Prothom Alo English, “Govt to approve BUET-designed new rickshaw…”, 29 April 2025. The report describes the move towards e-registration, driver licensing and a BUET-designed safer battery-rickshaw model, and notes the longstanding regulatory gap. https://en.prothomalo.com/bangladesh/city/q0u0lowpyx

3. Office of the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, “OHCHR and the rights to water and sanitation”. https://www.ohchr.org/en/water-and-sanitation

4. The Daily Star, “Regulating battery-run rickshaws”, 4 October 2025. https://www.thedailystar.net/law-our-rights/law-vision/news/regulating-battery-run-rickshaws-4001906

5. World Bank, Toward Great Dhaka: A New Urban Development Paradigm Eastward, 2018; and Bangladesh Country Environmental Analysis, 2018. The latter identifies limited local-level planning capacity as a driver of unplanned urbanisation.

6. World Bank, Toward Great Dhaka, 2018; Asian Development Bank urban governance programmes in Bangladesh, including work identifying weak urban governance, planning capacity and citizen participation as linked constraints.

7. Prothom Alo English, “Govt will be held responsible if DAP revised under pressure”, 19 March 2025; The Business Standard, reporting concerns from urban planners about amendments to the Detailed Area Plan, 4 December 2024.

8. RAJUK, Detailed Area Plan information; M. S. H. Swapan, “Realities of community participation in metropolitan planning in Bangladesh”, Habitat International 43 (2014), 191–197; related research on participatory urban governance in Bangladesh.

9. UK Cabinet Office, Consultation Principles, updated 19 March 2018. https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/consultation-principles-guidance/consultation-principles-2018

10. UNDP Bangladesh, “Government Approves National Urban Policy 2025”, 2 January 2026. The policy promotes decentralised urban growth, local governance, meaningful citizen participation, affordable housing and social protection for the urban poor. https://www.undp.org/bangladesh/news/government-approves-national-urban-policy-2025

Personal note: the classroom account concerning the water tanker in Gujarat is presented as the author’s recollection of a University of Sheffield teaching discussion, not as a reported incident independently verified for this article.