Battling a prolonged crisis driven by soaring costs, fuel shortages and regulatory harassment, the Bangladesh Restaurant Owners Association on Sunday placed an 11-point set of demands before the government, urging urgent relief measures ahead of the upcoming national budget.

At a press conference held at Dhaka Reporters Unity (DRU), the association's Secretary General Imran Hasan warned that restaurant footfall has been falling steadily and the sector faces collapse if the government does not act swiftly.

"If the current situation continues, restaurant owners across Bangladesh will go bankrupt in the near future," he cautioned.

The restaurant industry, still reeling from the economic fallout of the Covid-19 pandemic, has been dealt fresh blows by the Russia-Ukraine war and the ongoing Middle East crisis , both of which have driven up fuel and commodity prices, discouraging consumers from dining out.

Topping the list is a call for rationalising VAT and tax rates in the next fiscal year's budget. However, the association clarified it is not asking for a revenue giveaway, rather it recommends broadening the tax net to compensate for any rate reduction, so government revenues remain intact.

On the energy front, the owners urged an immediate resolution of the LPG shortage and restoration of new government gas-line connections to restaurant establishments.

The association also called for an end to what it described as harassment-driven inspections by multiple government agencies, including RAJUK, the Department of Inspection for Factories and Establishments, the Fire Service and the Department of Environment, and demanded that business representatives be included in any inspection teams.

Other demands included a halt to corporate encroachment into the restaurant sector, formal recognition of the industry as a distinct industrial sector, and the immediate resumption of trade licence issuance and renewal by Dhaka North and South City Corporations.

The owners further demanded an end to what they called extortion, hostage-taking and intimidation carried out under the banner of trade unions, along with government-managed skill training programmes for unskilled workers in the sector.

The association flagged a crippling bureaucratic bottleneck, noting that opening a single restaurant currently requires between 10 and 12 separate certificates from various authorities, a process that can take anywhere from two to six months. This complexity, they argued, also makes food safety compliance harder to enforce in practice.

To cut through the red tape, the Secretary General called for a dedicated one-stop service centre for the restaurant sector to streamline licensing and strengthen food safety monitoring simultaneously.