Bringing discipline on the roads
Bangladeshs overall traffic is very unruly. This is because a lot of vehicles show utter disdain in following the traffic rules while on roads and highways. While violation of traffic disciplines often causes fatal road accidents; in cities particularly in the capital, it is a major reason of traffic jams, one of the factors for which Dhaka is regarded one of the worst livable cities in the world. There is not a single day in all the 365 days of a year when you would not find several casualties on the roads. The nation has become so insensitive towards these deaths that a road accident hardly captures peoples attention nowadays. But it is the victims family who know the pain of loss.
The Road Transports and Bridges Minister Obaidul Quader often makes very frank comments about his responsibility. This time also, after so many deaths on the highways, before and after Eid, the minister came up with his confessions and said that when people are being killed like birds in road accidents, he had a responsibility in this regard.
But while this candidness in different situations might have elicited our approval, here it fails to do so simply because our expectation is he, as the responsible minister, would deliver in actually minimising the deaths on the roads rather that making any frank confession about his failure. Isnt it another way of making light the responsibility he is there to perform?
However, the minister was right when he said that dignitaries and influential people often are more responsible for creating traffic jams than the common people who usually follow traffic rules. Reacting to Obaidul Quaders one such comment, a few days ago the LGED Minister Engineer Musharraf Hussain, rather very puzzlingly, came up with an excuse that, for security reasons, the government dignitaries, often carrying flags, indeed can violate the traffic rules.
While we can apply the doctrine of necessity in certain emergency situations, the fact of the matter is when vehicles with important people inside run through forbidden lanes, they do that just because they do not want to wait for a while like common others until the green signal comes. The point here is as traffic laws are not same for everybody on the roads common people often are seen violating rules when an opportunity comes.
Each life is important and Bangladesh society must now be very serious about reducing road accidents by educating peoplehigh or low, common or uncommonabout the necessity of following rules on the roads.
