Road accidents cause inequality

In a conversation on the occasion of Nobel Prize award ceremony in 2005, Nobel Laureate in economics Thomas Schelling said the number of people who die due to road accidents
and fatalities in the United States is
three times as much as the number of people who were killed in the 9/11 attack.
More recently, another Nobel Laureate economist Joseph Stiglitz has mentioned the enormity of road accidents in an article attributing these fatalities to automobile driving habit in the US. It is clear from this statement that the number of road accidents and fatalities in the US is very high.
Another factor that hardly makes the headlines of newspapers is alcoholism. Drinking and driving mostly cause accidents in the US.
But compared to the American scenario, we don't have the drinking and driving epidemics in Bangladesh. Yet, the number of road accidents is quite high.
 Every day, a large number of people die from road accidents which happen either due to slack law and order enforcement or because of reckless driving habits of drivers or owing to fragile and unfit vehicles that escape careful scrutiny by the concerned authority or due to faulty road system.
Whatever the causes are, the consequences of road accidents are grim and devastating.
Road accidents destroy a family, its hope, its aspirations, its future and above all its well- being.
If a graduate student from a poor family whose education was funded out of hard-earned money of his parent dies in a road accident, what kind of sufferings will the family have to go through in the coming days?
It will be a sad tale of grinding poverty. The poor and destitute parents must have dreamt of a colourful future expecting that one day their child will graduate and help them escape the jaws of poverty. Due to careless driving, their dream gets shattered.
The future now awaits them with poverty and affliction. Road accidents produce inter-generational poverty and inequality.
Road accidents not only cause drainage of social and economic resources but also increase poverty and inequality in the society. Even if the victims survive, they often spend the rest of their lives crippled.
On being crippled, they are forced to do the kinds of jobs that are not only socially hated but also an utter waste of productive labour that they possess.
A lot of them start begging on the streets losing their hands, eyes, legs
and other parts of the body to
survive.
If the background of the crippled beggars in Dhaka city is surveyed, one may find that a significant number of them became crippled due to road accidents and thus were forced to beg.
If we study the relation between economic inequality and road accidents, we can easily pinpoint such a co-relation over time. A time series study will blatantly reveal such relation.
It has now become imperative for all of us to prevent unwanted road accidents and fatalities.
Though we have recently seen a flurry of discussions both in printing and electronic media, we have to take concrete actions stepping down to the field so
that culprits and violators get due
punishment.
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