Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samiti (BJKS) told the nation that in the month of September a total of 502 people were killed and 964 others injured in 504 road accidents across the country. BJKS also informed that 50 railway accidents took 46 lives. On the waterfront, 17 people died, 15 were injured, and three went missing in 13 accidents last month. Thus, as many as 565 deaths and 982 injuries occurred in the last month alone.
The figures seem absurd, unnatural, and to some extent unearthly. When we are told that in the month of September 502 people have lost their lives in road accidents, we pause for a while and wonder who in the government will take responsibility of so many premature deaths? We say government because road management is part of governance; hundreds are employed to run various offices under the Ministry of Road Communication spending colossal sums every year in the name of disciplining the roads to minimize road crashes. But in reality, money is spent all right, but where is discipline? The number of accidents keeps rising while complete lawlessness and blatant disregard for traffic rules and regulations prevail on roads. Drivers somehow sense that they will be able to buy their freedom within two weeks of arrest. And if they have a ‘powerful’ organization behind them they would not have to go to jail in the first place.
Therefore, with such a mechanism of impunity existing, the frenzy of over speeding on highways by bus, trucks and smaller vehicles goes on in a mad rush to overtake one another. Even where roads are narrow these heavy vehicles do not slow down. Any driver who can violate laws and reach the destination before others is considered a hero among the drivers. He in fact gets an offer from rival companies at a higher salary.
It is painful but true that people in general as well as the media outlets have apparently become less sensitive to road accidents because of the frequency of the incidents. It has been observed that if only the nature of an accident is dramatic with many deaths and dozens of victims lining up for help, it will get a front page treatment in Newspapers and get prime time coverage in all news channels. Otherwise, a report of one or two deaths will not stir anyone. These minor accidents are given a single or two-column coverage in the country page. Too many deaths, unfortunately, make us insensitive to human lives.
In any civilized country, the ministry bosses or even the minister concerned usually visits the sites of major road crashes, gives necessary instructions, and arranges safe and quick evacuation of the victims. We do not remember witnessing any such steps taken by any minister or secretary of the roads communication ministry. But, we do remember the heart-melting smile of the king of transport owners and drivers Janab Shahjahan Khan of the previous regime. Every time people lost lives on the roads in fatal accidents he would smile and give a short political speech. He would offer different kinds of stories to save his drivers and vehicle owners who were involved in the accident. Why would he do that? Well, they were members of Bangladesh Road Transport Workers Federation and Jatio Sramik Federation, both founded by him. He brushed aside all recommendations of experts including BUET to bring order on the roads. It has been alleged that he would protect the drivers and owners to maintain his hold on the two organizations.
But Shahjahan Khan is a nightmare of the past. He is a good riddance of bad rubbish. Who is responsible now and what are they doing? In the last one year, how many rogue drivers have been arrested and sentenced by the interim government? What are they afraid of?
We have to probe deep into the problems behind the high incidence of road accidents in this country. There are many pertinent issues that need to be addressed carefully if we want to minimize road accidents. Engineers tell us there are innate structural faults in our highways. The faults begin with their very design. They stress that there are too many curves and bends on our highways, and the width is not of international standard. The frequent bends are results of corruption during the designing stage when people concerned took bribes to save a person’s land from falling within the project. A poor man could not give bribes hence he lost a larger portion of his land. Moreover, large trees and foliage and shrubs in the curves now bring visibility down to almost zero. We have observed that heavy vehicles like passenger buses and loaded trucks do not slow down at such dangerous curves thereby increasing the risk of accidents. Many vehicles crash on the trees as there is no empty space on the two sides.
In the year 2004, WHO had coined the slogan, “Road Safety is No Accident”. It might have sounded metaphorical, but it told the hard truth. Meaning, you need to plan well to ensure road safety, it cannot happen accidentally or by chance. That year and many years after that, a good number of seminars and workshops were held in Bangladesh and other accident prone countries in a bid to minimize road accidents. Volumes of recommendations from researchers and engineers were sent to the Bangladesh communication ministry with request for their implementation. We believe, had some of those recommendations been implemented we would have seen less occurrence of road crashes today.
The writer is a Senior Journalist
