The number of customers buying vehicles has gone done drastically. According to the vehicle dealers in the country this follows the suspension of place order for vehicles by the Royal Monetary Authority. It was suspended during the second week of March as a measure to address the Rupee crunch in the country.
Later in the mid of March, the place order on dollar based vehicles were also suspended. This has been suspended as the “letter of credit” where the bank guarantees on behalf of the vehicle dealers, needs to send huge amount of Rupees to the international vehicle dealers. Right now the vehicle dealers are selling only those vehicles that have been ordered before the notification.
“Our main business is vehicles from India. We are expecting few vehicles, which we have ordered before the notification. So that may pull us through 1 to 2 months but after that then there will be no vehicles so our staff and all of us will be having nothing to do,” said Pema Lodey, Dy. General Manager, Bhutan Hyundai Motors.
The Managing Director of Samden vehicles said Rupee crunch has affected the nation as a whole. He said since the government is trying their best to solve the problem, he had no comments.
BBS tried to get in touch with other vehicle dealers but they refused to talk on camera. However, some people think this is something good that has come out of the Rupee crunch problem.
“I personally feel this will benefit the nation as a whole. People say we cannot buy vehicles because of Rupee problem but this will cut down air pollution since the number of vehicles has decreased,” said Denjay, a local resident.
“The place order on vehicle deals with a lot of outflow of Rupee from our country. And to get spare parts from Jaigon we need Rupee and to get rupee from our banks is very hard. So I think this will help solve Rupee shortage in our country,” said another Thimphu resident, Jigme Lhendup.
Till last month 790 vehicles were registered with the Road Safety and Transport Authority. The RTO said within two weeks the office has seen a drastic decrease in the number of people coming to register their vehicle.
