On April 1, Maisha Momotaz Meem, a North South University student, was killed in a hit-and-run incident on the Kuril-Bishaw Road flyover. Last year, on April 15, Mukit Askari, another student of the same university, died in Narsingdi in a road accident. These stories do not end here because road accidents have become part of Bangladesh's cultural makeup.
In September 2018, legislators rushed out the Road Transport Act 2018 because of city-wide protests in the capital after two Shaheed Ramiz Uddin Cantonment College students were killed in a road accident earlier that year. Even though the government enacted the legislation, its implementation was questionable due to protests from transport operators and workers. When the government finally took the initiative to execute the legislation in November 2019, transport associations went on strike, demanding that specific provisions of the statute be amended.
The legislation was partially implemented because the government caved to the transport companies’ demands, keeping some of its provisions as transport leaders promised considerable reform.
The Road Transport Act provides five-year imprisonment if anyone causes an accident through reckless and negligent driving and kills or injures someone severely in the process. However, the number of people killed in road accidents continues to rise.
According to a report from the Road Safety Foundation, in 2021, 6,284 people were killed in 5,371 reported road accidents, including 927 women and 734 children. Moreover, in 2021, road hits increased by 13.47%, fatalities by 15.70%, and injuries by 1.20%. Nonetheless, several private organizations recorded a much higher number of deaths during the same period. The absence of by-lanes or separate lanes for slow-moving cars is a significant cause of highway accidents. The United Nations declared 2011-20 as the decade of road safety action to acknowledge the economic impact of road accidents on developing countries.
According to a World Bank report released in February 2020, Bangladesh would need to invest an estimated $7.8 billion over the next decade to halve its road crash deaths. So, to help Bangladesh improve road safety, on March 29, the World Bank approved $358m in funding to assist Bangladesh in improving road safety and reducing fatalities and injuries from road traffic incidents on high-risk highways and district roads.
Now the only question that needs to be answered is: Will the necessary steps to prevent road accidents ever be taken? And if so, when can we expect these steps to be made?
Experts argue that policy-makers in countries like Bangladesh must consider road safety a public health and sustainable development issue instead of a transport issue. To discipline this sector and make it safer for everybody, it needs immediate institutional reform. There will be no change until good governance, accountability, and planning are all ensured within the next few years. In addition, there are weak controls in issuing road permits and driver's licenses and a lack of enforcement of traffic laws. It is time for the government to finally do something rather than stand by idly and watch as more innocent lives are lost on our dangerous roads.
Drivers should be paid a monthly wage rather than working on a contractual basis -- this would reduce or stop reckless driving as vehicles would no longer compete for profit. Include the topic of road safety into the school curriculum as well. If we can teach our children the principles of road safety from an early age, they will remember the lessons for the rest of their lives.
Bangladesh's dreams of middle-income status and progress are under threat due to a culture that has continuously failed to value the lives of its citizens. This reality is incompatible with any accurate idea of progress and turns middle-income status into nothing more than another rung on a limitless ladder.
If the necessary steps are not taken immediately, people’s demands for justice for those who have lost their lives to our roads and highways will still be there.
Md Fahmedul Islam Dewan is a freelance contributor.
