Death traps on highways

The extent of neglect and apathy meted out to the country's workers in general comes up quite often and on repeated grim occasions. Few in the authorities and private employers care about it. The practice goes on in an ambience of nonchalance. Consequently, workers keep dying tragically and getting severely wounded. The latest such tragic deaths and casualties occurred on Dhaka-Sylhet Highway involving 25 hapless construction workers. Of them 14 died and 11 were injured. The mishap occurred in the early morning of June 7 last. A head-on collision between a sand laden truck and an improvised pickup, banned on highways, has led to the terrible mishap. The construction workers were being transported on the pickup from one place to another in Sylhet's Dakshin Surma. According to a passenger of the pickup, the driver of the truck was dozing while it approached the van.

On the other hand, the workers were allegedly packed in the pickup like sardines. Along with others, a few issues warrant special mention in the accident's aftermath. The most important of them is the highway authorities' lackadaisical stance on the oversight of vehicles' condition. A perennial problem with the country's highways is all kinds of automobile can operate on them. They range from weird-looking makeshift public carriers like pickup vans, rundown buses to crookedly built three-wheelers. In spite of a ban imposed on these crudely fashioned contraptions, they move on the national and regional highways with impunity.

The likes of the so-called pick-up van involved in the Sylhet accident remain prohibited on the country's highways. Few care about the ban. Travel of passengers on these so-called transports is a common sight in almost all parts of the country. As a result, fatal accidents occur often on the highways. Vehicles unfit for movement on the highways can ply because of a perennial dearth of sufficient law enforcers and also because of opposition to their ban from local lawmakers and UP chairmen. It remains acute in the areas far from Dhaka. Even the flyover segments on the fringe of the capital are witness to traffic movement irregularities of different characters. Dropping of passengers from buses at non-existent stoppages is one of them. Construction of staircases in the middle of flyovers to help passengers board a bus and disembark from it created quite a bedlam sometime back. In the face of a chaos, the law enforcement authorities intervened. The unlawful staircases were dismantled. The country's highway network is in need of similar drastic actions such as impounding the improvised vehicles declared banned on the highways.

The Dhaka-Sylhet Highway accident brings to the fore many a flaw besetting the inter-district movement of traffic. They include drowsiness of drivers at the steering for long hours by night. At times they are compelled to drive a heavy truck without even a short rest. Lots of vehicle owners do not take cognisance of the imperative of their drivers' need for rest or sleep. But it is drivers who find themselves in the dock. Most of them are compulsively reckless in their driving job, which leads to repeated fatal accidents. A noticeable aspect of the driving assignment taken by the habitually reckless persons is their rashness while at the wheel. The reckless drivers earn a lot of ill reputation for the circumspect and professional highway drivers. This trend must come to an end.