Published :
Updated :
For all latest news, follow The Financial Express Google News channel.
Not many people nowadays are deeply moved by the heart-rending reports of avoidable road accidents that make families happy and together seconds before devastated in the blink of an eye. The public have accepted it as though it is something normal as they do not expect anything better from the way the transport operators are getting rowdier, rash and insensitive by the day. A lack of proper traffic management within the big cities as well as on the highways is adding to the chaos and often leads to vehicular collisions, deaths and injuries.
As Jatri Kalyan Samity (JKS), a passengers' welfare platform, reported on Saturday, April 20 last, during the Eid rush in 15 days between April 4 and 18, 407 people were killed and 1,398 injured in 399 road accidents across the country. The passengers' welfare body further informed that compared to last year's road accidents over the same period, it is a significant rise in the percentage of fatalities (by 31.25 per cent) and frequency of accidents (by 24.08 per cent). As usual, concerns are routinely raised from different quarters including the government after a massive accident takes place. One may recall here the student protests that spread like a wildfire across the country at the end of July in 2018 when a bus that was in a mad race to overtake another ploughed through a crowd near the airport crushing two students to death under its wheels and wounding nine others. Outraged, students of different schools and colleges took to the streets in protest demanding 'students' safety' on the road. At a point, protesting students assumed the role of traffic police and checked papers of the moving vehicles. The general commuters and the public expressed solidarity with the agitating students despite the temporary traffic dislocations created on the streets. In fact, all wanted an end to the transport operators' anarchy on the roads. The government apparently bowed to the students' demands, issued 17 directives from the Prime Minister's Office (PMO) asking the authorities concerned to adopt certain measures to introduce some semblance of discipline in the transport sector, hastily approved a draft Road Transport Act (RTA) 2018 with the provision of a maximum 5.0 years' jail for deaths caused by rash driving and so on and so forth. But when it came to the question of implementing the RTA 18, transport associations came out in a body protesting some sections of the Act and the progress of work stalled. Again we are back to square one. Anarchy is again the order of the day on the streets and highways. So, the laws for the roads remain mothballed, at least for now.
However, in view of improving some infrastructural aspects of road safety, the government has undertaken the first-ever World Bank (WB)-financed project of this kind in South Asia in April last year. The project named 'Road Safety Project (RSF)' is worth about Tk50 billion and is intended to improve management capacities of the government agencies engaged in maintaining road safety. The aim is to reduce deaths and injuries from road accidents. Projected to be completed in five years between May, 2023 and by the end of June, 2028, more than 75 per cent of the project fund would be provided by the WB, while the government's share is about 25 per cent. The project activities would involve assessing deficiencies in existing road safety regime, creation of an integrated traffic management and incident detection system, training for a large number of fresh recruits of drivers, developing an integrated information database for the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) and creating various infrastructures for the purpose. The roads and highways department (RHD) of the government would act as the lead agency of the project. Though it is already a year into the said RSF's implementation phase, nothing of substance could be heard so far about the progress of work. According to reports, the project is still in its preparatory stage. As always, it is learnt to be the procurement process that is eating up a large part of the project time! But when it is about saving lives of people travelling by transports, there should be a sense of urgency in implementing a project at least to meet the deadline.
According to the World Health Organisation (WHO), deaths from road accidents in Bangladesh are more than three times those of advanced countries. They cost the nation two to three per cent of its Gross Domestic Product (GDP).
It is common knowledge that the death toll from these accidents is on a rising curve, but what are the real figures? The wide variation in road casualty figures from agency to agency, be those from the government, private, or from multilateral development agencies, makes it difficult to have a correct picture of the situation on the roads and highways. Consider the WHO figures on road accident-related casualties between 2015 and 2018. Calculations show, in these three years, death toll on the roads rose by over 17 per cent. But in the next three years including 2021, the death toll jumped by about 26. 60 per cent from what it was in 2018. The actual number of deaths from road accidents was 31,578 in 2021.
But by comparison, the data on road accident casualties provided by the police as reported in the media were 2,376 (in 2015), 2,635 in 2018 and 5,084 in 2021, which were around 11 per cent of the WHO figures of 2015 and 2018 and 16 per cent of that of 2021 respectively. Now which figures should be used to make a correct estimation of the deaths from vehicular crashes on the roads of Bangladesh and adopt matching policies?
Creating a road accident database, as indicated in the Road Safety Project, should be given the priority it deserves.