Are safe roads and the right to live too much to ask for?
The killing of a Notre Dame College student by a garbage compactor vehicle of the Dhaka South City Corporation (DSCC) on November 24 has once again brought to light the sorry state of road safety in our country. Nayeem Hasan, a second-year student of Notre Dame College, was going to college in the morning when the DSCC vehicle hit him. As he fell on the street after being hit, the driver ran him over, injuring him severely. Nayeem later succumbed to his injuries. Reportedly, the compactor vehicle that killed Nayeem was not being driven by any of the appointed drivers of the DSCC, but by a cleaning staff. On November 25, another road accident killed three college students and injured two others as a CNG-run auto-rickshaw was hit by a BRTC bus in Chandpur's Kachua upazila. In both cases, the drivers fled the scene immediately after the accidents. At the time of writing this editorial, another accident in the city's Panthapath area was reported, where another waste compactor vehicle of Dhaka North City Corporation (DNCC) ran over Ahsan Kabir Khan, an employee of the Daily Sangbad.
As students across Dhaka have been protesting with their six-point demand—including justice for Nayeem and compensation for his family—they pointed to the fact that the demands of the 2018 road safety movement have not been met by the authorities till date. People continue to lose their lives on the roads on a daily basis, while the issue of road safety is never taken seriously by the authorities concerned. According to Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity, 3,222 people lost their lives in road accidents in the first six months of this year.
After the student movement for safer roads in 2018, the government formulated the Road Transport Act, 2018, which has not been fully enforced yet. The government had relaxed several sections of the act at the demand of the transport owners and workers, which goes against the interests of commuters. The result of the authorities' indifference towards implementing the law is the ever-increasing chaos in our road transport sector, resulting in more deaths and injuries on our roads.
To prevent our road safety from deteriorating even further, the government must implement the Road Transport Act, 2018 without further delay. It should hold discussions with transport experts and all concerned stakeholders to make the law effective.
In the case of Nayeem's death, we want to ask the DSCC authorities: Why was the heavy vehicle being driven by a cleaner, instead of an appointed driver? The fact that there are only 86 drivers for the 317 heavy vehicles that the DSCC owns answers the question to some extent. However, we hope that the committees formed to investigate the incident will find the real problems that lie at the root of this crisis. The authorities must do everything necessary to make our roads safer. The time for excuses is over!
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