SHAS­TRI BOODAN

For­eign-used car deal­ers and the Min­istry of Trade have agreed to main­tain a quo­ta of 13,500 used cars an­nu­al­ly. Visham Bab­wah, head of the TT Au­to­mo­tive Deal­ers As­so­ci­a­tion (TTA­DA) said the as­so­ci­a­tion met with of­fi­cials of the min­istry on Thurs­day. He said the min­istry ad­mit­ted that they did not con­sult the TTA­DA be­fore they in­vit­ed ap­pli­cants to be­come used car deal­ers.

Bab­wah, the CEO of P&V Mar­ket­ing, said the TTA­DA want­ed to see the un­used quo­ta go to ac­tive deal­ers who had a lim­it­ed num­ber of cars they could bring in for the year. He said some of the 399 car deal­ers in T&T could on­ly im­port ten cars for the year, mak­ing their op­er­a­tions eco­nom­i­cal­ly un­fea­si­ble. Bab­wah said these deal­ers should get a boost in their quo­ta as well as the quo­ta should be raised for those who had a de­sire to im­port more cars.

"The quo­ta should be in­creased to all ex­ist­ing deal­ers since they have been suf­fo­cat­ed for the past five years be­cause with the quo­ta sys­tem deal­ers got a frac­tion of what they im­port­ed be­fore the quo­ta was im­ple­ment­ed. "But this was slashed by ten per cent an­nu­al­ly for the three years fol­low­ing the im­ple­men­ta­tion," Bab­wah said.

The TTA­DA be­lieves that on­ly af­ter this is done that the re­main­der of the quo­ta should be shared amongst any new­ly reg­is­tered deal­ers. Bab­wah said there were many in­ac­tive deal­ers but there was no sys­tem in place by the min­istry to re­move these deal­ers. Bab­wah said TTA­DA wants the gov­ern­ment to start im­pos­ing stricter reg­u­la­tions on the in­dus­try since he be­lieves there are some un­scrupu­lous deal­ers giv­ing the ma­jor­i­ty a bad name.

He said TTA­DA wants the min­istry to put laws in place to deal with unau­tho­rised un­reg­is­tered per­sons pos­ing as deal­ers. Bab­wah said the min­istry and TTA­DA will meet in Jan­u­ary for fur­ther dis­cus­sions to im­prove the in­dus­try.