Greed Clouds Your Judgment - Contain It!

Eight years shy of half a century back, a rule was passed by the Ministry of Finance that is symptomatic of how the Bhutanese mind works or, more accurately, does not work.

I do not know if this rule still exists but it did in the late 1970s/early 1980s. The rule was that trucks plying on the hilly roads of Bhutan cannot carry load of more than net weight of 5 MT, irrespective of the truck’s carrying capacity. Net weight is the weight derived after deducting the tare weight from the gross weight.

But there was a problem: how to find out if a truck’s load was within the permitted limit? The answer: Weigh Bridge. Weigh Bridges are designed to weigh fully laden trucks by placing the truck atop the mechanical contraptions.

How a Weigh Bride looks. These are installed and used in places where there is huge movement of cargo.

Given that there were not much traffic those days, the Ministry of Finance ordered and installed one single unit of the Weigh Bridge - in Phuentsholing, which even then was the commercial hub of Bhutan. The installation came into use and things began to work smoothly, until one day, a smart fellow in the Ministry of Finance decide that here was an opportunity to generate some additional revenue.

Consequently a rule was passed that required all trucks heading out of Phuentsholing into India, also to be weighed, and pay the weighing fee.

This is when the fun began - the smart aleck at the Ministry of Finance (I know the person but will not name him) forgot that the Weigh Bridge ordered by the Ministry of Finance was intended to weigh trucks carrying net weights not exceeding 5 MT. The reason being that trucks heading to Thimphu and the western regions in the north was not allowed to carry loads in excess of 5 MT. By contrast, the tare weight of the huge trucks, then known as “Punjab Body” trucks destined for India, weighed in excess of 7 MT.

Thus, on the first day the rule came into effect, the first Punjab Body truck destined for Hapur in India, fully laden with raw lumber blocks from the stock yards of the Export Division of the Ministry of Trade, Industry & Forests, positioned itself on the Weigh Bridge - with a combined gross weight in excess of 25 MT! The result was that the Weigh Bridge was crushed to the shape of a pancake - forever maimed and turned into a pile of scrap metal!

Now here it gets even more hilarious. Because the Weigh Bridge was smashed out of shape - no trucks could be weighed - but the truckers needed the wieghment slip to comply with the rules and to show to the police at the check gates. No problem - the person manning the Weigh Bridge station diligently wrote out hand-written weighment slips, with imaginary weights on them, and pocketed the fees - and no one was the wiser.

Moral behind the episode: Greed clouds your judgment - contain it!

The account of how I happened to stumble onto this peculiar occurrence is another interesting story to be told another day.