THE death of an eight-year-old boy having been crushed between two buses at Gulshan in Dhaka on April 4 yet again shows that the authorities concerned have allowed the road to continue to be a death trap for citizens. The boy was hawking around books near Sergeant Police Books when a speeding double-decker of the Road Transport Corporation crushed him against the rear of another bus and left him critically wounded. The police seized the BRTC bus, but the driver managed to escape. This is, however, not the first case of road fatalities involving a vehicle of the state-owned Road Transport Corporation. On April 3, 2018, a 22-year-old student of the Government Titumir College lost his right hand after it got stuck between the speeding buses of the Road Transport Corporation and Sujan Paribahan in Dhaka. The nature of the accident and the death of a student that time shocked the nation. The High Court ordered the formation of a committee to assess the legal liability of the transport companies and ordered them to pay Tk 1 crore to the victim family. The public agency neither paid the family any compensation nor took any effective steps to prevent accidents.
The long-standing problems of poor management, retrograde planning, and deep-seated corruption that have turned the corporation into a consistently loss-making entity and its vehicles accident-prone despite regular cash and resource injections could have been effectively attended to if the corporation had readily addressed the problems. However, the problems are not typical of the state-owned agency, the entire transport sector is plagued with irregularities and corruption. At least 6,524 people died and 11,407 became injured in 6,911 accidents, as the Road Safety Foundation says, in 2023. Experts have asked the government to address three concerns to bring some order to the sector 鈥� the shortage of skilled drivers, a monthly wage structure for transport workers and compensation for victims of road accidents. Recent Road Transport Authority data indicate that at least one million registered vehicles are run by drivers without licences. Instead of improving its training capacity, the authorities concerned have repeatedly relaxed the licensing rules to accommodate unskilled drivers. More important, the political influence that the transport owners and workers鈥� federation has on the government has been an impediment to the enforcement of the Road Transport Act. Time and again, road safety campaigners have raised concern about the conflict of interest of lawmakers with direct stakes in the transport sector.
It is time that the government recognised its failures and took early steps to improve the road safety situation, setting a legal precedent by giving exemplary punishment to all responsible, from transport owners operating buses flouting regulations to government officers issuing fitness certificates to unfit vehicles. Equally important for the government is to acknowledge that its prolonged indifference towards the cause is nothing short of negligent homicide.