Bangladesh To Count Its Entire Fleet In First National Vessel Census
Bangladesh will conduct its first nationwide vessel census over ten days from the twentieth of August, covering seagoing, coastal and inland craft, at a cost of about 430 million taka, roughly 3.5 million dollars, within a project running from 2025 to 2028. The exercise is intended to establish, for the first time, how many vessels the country actually has.
That such a count has never been done is itself the most revealing fact. Bangladesh sits on one of the world's largest river systems, moves an enormous share of its domestic freight and passengers by water, and operates one of the largest ship recycling industries anywhere. A maritime economy of that scale functioning without a reliable register of its own fleet indicates how much of the activity has developed outside formal oversight.
The safety consequences are well documented. Bangladesh has suffered repeated ferry disasters with heavy loss of life, and investigations routinely find overloading, unregistered or informally modified vessels, and passenger numbers far above any certified capacity. Enforcement of a survey and certification regime is impossible when the regulator does not know which vessels exist, and a census is the precondition for everything that follows.
The economic case is equally strong. Accurate fleet data determines what infrastructure to build, where dredging is needed, how much fuel the sector consumes and what its emissions are. It also matters internationally: countries reporting shipping activity under global conventions rely on national registers, and gaps in those registers propagate into every aggregate built on top of them.
Ten days is a short window for an exercise of this scope, and the risk is a count that captures the formal fleet accurately while missing much of the informal one. The vessels most likely to be missed are precisely those the exercise most needs to find: small, unregistered, locally built craft carrying passengers on routes no authority monitors. Whether the census reaches them will determine whether it is a foundation or a formality. The project period running to 2028 suggests the intention is a repeatable system rather than a single count, which is the right ambition, since a register that is not maintained decays quickly in a fleet where vessels are rebuilt, renamed and transferred informally. The value of the exercise will be judged in several years rather than at the end of the ten days.
