Editorial
We mourn the children's death
Resolve to make highways safe
Educational institutions across the country have mourned deaths of 44 school boys in a truck plunge at Mirsarai in Chittagong last Monday. Teachers, students and staff of the institutions expressed their grief wearing black badges. Education Minister pledged financial grants to the families of the victims.
While we fully empathise with the symbolic gestures we would however stress the importance of taking lessons from this huge national tragedy.
In spite of our being resigned to such preventable road accidents, if this particular tragic incident does not wake us up to the vulnerability to highway accidents then nothing else will. Causes of these accidents have been identified many times over. Reckless driving by truck and bus drivers, most of them unskilled and without valid license, lack of road sense, dilapidated yet overloaded vehicles, all contribute to the frequent catastrophes. The use of mobile phones while driving is extremely hazardous in speeding traffic.
We have to accept the fact that accidents are just waiting to happen on our highways. There is practically no highway police to monitor the vehicles and carry out random checking at different points, which is the routine practice in other countries. Most of the drivers simply vanish after such accidents and they are hardly brought to book. Even if some of them were nabbed there were hardly any instance of trial and punishment to the offenders.
It is high time that the government came up with some serious measures to stop these accidents. It should be easily done by increasing the number of highway patrols, equipping them adequately to do their job, continuous supervision of the highway traffic,
replacing lenient laws of punishment by exemplary ones and strict enforcement of those. For all practical purposes, the responsibility rests with the government to ensure safe journey for the people.
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