They tell us 12 people died. Then, as if the earth had not finished drinking that blood, the news cycle refreshed. Another crash. Another town. More bodies. In the past seven days, the roads of Bangladesh, from the jagged, lethal corridor of Cumilla to the highways beyond, have been transformed into a national slaughterhouse.
But statistics do not bleed. Statistics do not leave behind a half-decorated home for Eid or a child’s toy that will never be picked up again.
I stood at the site of the Paduar Bazar crash, and what I saw was not a mishap. It was a crime scene where the state is the lead suspect. I saw the face of a father, crushed beyond recognition, a man whose last act on this earth was a warm embrace, hugging his son goodbye at the airport. He was supposed to go home to his family. Instead, his son’s life has been ignited into a living hell of grief.
I saw a four-year-old girl’s laughter extinguished. She became a casualty of a missing underpass that exists only on paper. At Paduar Bazar, there is not even a skeleton of a bridge to show for decades of promises. There is only a haunting, empty void where safety should be, a vacuum that proves the sanctioned funds never touched the soil. Every time we look at that empty crossing, we are looking at the reason that child is dead.
But the most chilling part of this tragedy is not the wreckage on the tracks. It is the mechanical way we consume it. We have become a nation of digital mourners. We scroll through the carnage with detached eyes, vent a flash of performative anger in a Facebook status, drop a sad emoji, and then, with terrifying ease, return to our dinner tables. We leave the broken families to rot in their grief while we simply wait for the next notification of a massacre to refresh our feeds.
How can we ignore the fact that we are also responsible? By accepting this cycle, by refusing to stay angry until the last brick of an underpass is laid, we have become silent accomplices to the looters. Our short-lived outrage is the very oxygen that allows this corruption to breathe.
As they said, the 750 Crore Paper Trail to a Grave.
The history of the Biroti to Miabazar stretch is a chronicle of grand promises and hollowed out budgets. My father’s records reveal a heartbreaking paper trail of what should have been. Heard, a 750 crore BDT project was sanctioned, with funds specifically secured from Japan’s JDCF, the Japan Deposit Control Fund, to modernise this highway.
The money was there. The plan was there. Yet, nearly twenty years later, the Paduar Bazar overpass is a ghost project. This is not an engineering failure. It is the physical manifestation of theft. Every Taka diverted from the Paduar Bazar rail overpass is a drop of blood on the hands of those who embezzled it. We have created a system where we sacrifice the poor and the middle class to line up the pockets of the powerful.
The theft of funds is only the first layer of the massacre. The second is the state sanctioned lawlessness of our transport sector. We allow killing machines on our roads, heavy vehicles with no fitness certificates, operated by drivers who obtained licenses through a bribe rather than a driving test.
We see drivers overloaded with back-to-back night shifts, fighting exhaustion or driving under the influence, while the bus owners, the untouchables of our society, remain unpunished and protected. They profit from the speed while we pay with our lives. Since 2014, over a hundred thousand lives have been claimed in this specific zone because basic safety infrastructure like the underpasses at Biroti, Jagurjuli, and Suagazi was never built.
I cannot forget the bus helper I saw in the ICU, or the face of the passenger whose head seemed like a map of stitches, his body broken. Somewhere, his little doll of a daughter is waiting for her father to come home for Eid. She does not know what JDCF funds are. She does not know about the 750 crore project. She only knows her father is missing.
This is no longer a request for development. It is a demand for survival.
We demand an immediate, transparent investigation into the 750 crore BDT meant for the Paduar Bazar overpass. We demand the immediate construction of the underpasses, rail-overpass at Biroti, Jagurjuli, Beltoli, and Suagazi and other pointed areas. We demand a total overhaul of the licensing system and the immediate prosecution of the bus owners who put unfit vehicles and exhausted drivers on our roads.
If we return to our normal lives today, we are signing the death warrants of the next 12 families. The killing fields of Cumilla have claimed enough. It is time we stopped counting the dead and started holding the living accountable. For that four-year-old girl and for the father who never made it home from the airport, our silence must end now.
How many more burials must we witness before a road becomes just a road, and not a grave?
(The views expressed in this article are solely those of the author)
The author is a professor at the University of Dhaka and a member of the Bangladesh Public Service Commission.
