Human lives matter little to bus drivers

The sight of a bus taking sharp turns on a busy road to get ahead of another bus to pick up passengers is common in Dhaka. It matters little to the first bus driver if a pedestrian comes under the wheels of his vehicle and gets killed in their mad rush.

What triggers these bus drivers to behave in such a reckless manner on the roads, where lives of the pedestrians are in question? On the one hand, underpaid and overworked as they are, these drivers know they have to earn enough to pay the owners of the buses—otherwise they may lose their jobs. They also have to pay their assistants from their cuts, to say nothing of the law enforcement personnel whose palms have to be greased regularly.

A report published in this daily says that around 5,500 passenger buses under 110 companies operate in and around Dhaka. The owners claim they pay on average Tk 1.8 crore in bribes every month to those who manage the city traffic. Emboldened by the corrupt practices, drivers ignore traffic rules and engage in overtaking one another to pick up as many passengers as they can to maximise profits. According to Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity, about 54 percent of the crashes in Dhaka last year involved buses being driven dangerously, and 5.33 percent of the crashes in Dhaka take place due to rash driving.

We believe a great deal has been reported on road accidents in all forms of media over the past decade, with the hope that the recommendations put forward by experts would be taken into cognisance, and a proper action plan would be put in place by the road safety authorities. But the relevant authorities fail to arrest rogue drivers and seize the unfit vehicles as the owners have already paid a "package" to them. Our report mentions a former assistant commissioner (traffic) of Dhaka Metropolitan Police, who admitted that the bus companies bribe the police because most buses don't have valid documents, and many drivers don't have valid driving licences. But, surprisingly—or perhaps, unsurprisingly—some current bosses of the DMP said they never found any evidence supporting such allegations. 

Road accidents in Bangladesh see deaths of nearly a dozen people every day because of reckless driving. This cannot go on forever. We urge the government to investigate the allegations of corruption in the law enforcement and take exemplary action against them. It's high time we started holding the stakeholders accountable for the deaths on the roads.