Road accidents with mounting toll of deaths hardly draw the attention of newspaper readers or TV viewers. Deaths on road are being gradually accepted as something normal. But the shock that the near and dear ones of the victims of fatal road accidents suffer is beyond the comprehension of those who might give a fleeting glance at the reports or the video clips of the scene of accident or the dead.
As for instance, the death of a supreme court lawyer, Parvin Sultana, on Sunday (July 16) in a road accident in which the motorbike she was riding with her relative, Sakhawat, was knocked down by a bus on the Mayor Muhammad Hanif Flyover near Jatrabari, may not have hit headlines. But her death was devastating, most unexpected and unacceptable to her family members, friends, colleagues and those who cared about her. But it was all over in the blink of an eye.
Human life is now something expendable in the eyes of the mindless road traffic operators. Of late, frequency of road mishaps and the deaths attendant on them have risen alarmingly. After the wars and pestilence, it is perhaps the highways, and the Bangladeshi ones, to be more specific, should now hold the third place as the biggest killers around. In the past, more men than women would die in road mishaps. Now with more women travelling on the roads and highways, the reckless traffic appears to have taken a liking to women, even their children, as their numbers as casualties on the highways attributable to road accidents are gradually on the rise. Let us have a look at the July 15 report on road mishap-related deaths published in this paper. Considering the pattern of deaths, it seems, they have a temporal bias. For when it comes to the statistics on the fatalities involving children, their number is shown to have increased by 16.6 per cent in the second quarter (April-June) of the current year (2023) when compared with the figures for the same period in the previous year (2022). On the contrary, fewer women died in highway accidents (a decrease by 8.53 per cent) during the second quarter of this year compared to the death figure in the first quarter. The report was originally prepared by an organisation styled, Shipping and Communication Reporters Forum (SCRF).The good news, according to the report, is that the fatalities due to the dreaded motorbikes have reduced by around 12 per cent. The number of accidents involving motorcycles have increased, though, by more than five per cent.
As further highlighted by the report, in the six months till June this year, some 455 children and 404 women lost their lives in road accidents across the country. Clearly, the country's highways and vehicles that run on them are not at all safe for women and children. The road transports are not safe not only due to their being accident-prone, but also for their operators being hostile towards them. But why so many children had to die in accidents involving road transport within a span of six months? By all accounts, the number is high. Mortality figures on children and women, if infectious diseases are not the cause of the deaths, are an indicator of a society's attitude towards them. How is our position in that respect? Do the figures on the death of so many women and children in the road accidents reveal anything of substance about Bangladesh society?
Those conducting researches on road accidents should look into the issue.
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