Curbing road accidents
Safer road plans on paper only
FAISAL MAHMUD
Concluding Part
Most of the plans to make roads and highways safe have remained unimplemented, making the formulation of a subsequent road safety policy a futile endeavour. To curb accidents, the communications ministry (now the ministry of road transport and bridges) has been formulating three-year plans since 1997. As of now, a total of seven three-year plans have been formulated. In the last three-year plan, the government had included several action points to reduce the number of road accidents by 50 per cent by 2024. Interestingly, in the fifth three-year plan, drafted in 2008, it was planned to reduce the number of road accidents by 1012 per cent by 2016. However, the number of accidents has remained almost static all these years. Mozammel Haq Chowdhury, secretary-general of Bangladesh Passengers Welfare Association, said most of these three-year plans have not been implemented. Apart from straightening 144 dangerous curves along the highways, the government has not done much all these years to curb the number of road accidents.
He added that the governments programmes for making roads safe remain mostly on paper. How many meetings has the National Road Safety Council (NRSC) conducted in the last 15 years? How many recommendations have been made that havent been fulfilled at all? he asked.
After renowned filmmaker Tareq Masud and journalist Mishuk Munir died in a road accident in 2011, the nine-member government sub-committee, led by Prof Anwar Hossain of Dhaka University, issued 52 recommendations to make the roads safe.
One such recommendation was to form a Road Safety Fund by allocating 15 per cent of funding for any project (for construction of roads and highways). As per the recommendation, this Road Safety Fund could have been spent on various road safety awareness programmes and research works.
At present, a total of 130 projects of constructing roads and highways is going on under the supervision of the Roads and Highways Division. The cumulative value of all these projects comes to Tk 60,000 crore. If only 1% of the worth of all these projects could be allocated to the Road Safety Fund, it would have around Tk 600 crore. Unfortunately, no such fund has been formed.
Experts on the road safety sector have long been claiming that research and survey projects for road safety are stuck due to the lack of funding. Moreover, the discrepancies in the accident data have hampered proper research work in this field.
Kazi Zakaria Islam, chief data analyst of the Accident Research Institute (ARI) of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET), told The Independent that for the data on accidents, they primarily rely on accident reports filed by the police on spot.
From media monitoring, we collect the secondary data. Therere always discrepancies between the police data and media data.
Zakaria added that to ensure the proper reporting of accidents from the spot, the ARI in 2010 imparted training to 800 police officers on reporting road accidents in a proper and standard way. The ARI trained the police officers to complete the standard accident report form (ARF), which has 92 points under five sections to document almost every factor behind an accident, including the road structure, collision, and vehicles involved.
After filling in the ARF manually on the spot, the police personnel need to input the data in the software, so that the record of every accident is digitally stored.
The standard ARF has been prepared by the Transport Research Laboratory, UK. With the aid of the roads and highway department and the World Bank, Bangladesh police implemented it in 1995, and made it mandatory for accident reporting. But the format in which the ARI gave training was a modification of the original 1995 version. In the modified form, the ARI used three new sections for co-coordinating the exact spot of the accident through the software, based upon the 92 points which a police officer has to fill up on the spot while reporting an accident.
Kazi Zakaria was a trainer at the Saroda Police Academy from 1995 on accident reporting under the Institutional Component Development Programme, which expired in 2002.
He joined the ARI in 2003. Since then, through his continuous persuasion, the training programme was restarted back in 2010, but lasted only for three months.
Now the ARFs that we are receiving in the ARI are not the ones for which we had imparted training. They are still using the old form with 69 points. Our primary source of information is the ARF, and its standard has seriously deteriorated, Zakaria told The Independent.
He added that even countries like the US consider ARF their primary source of accident information, because a good ARF does half the work in any accident research.
Atiqul Islam, the deputy inspector-general (DIG) of the Highway Police Division, said the on-duty police officer covering any accident fills up the ARF and sends it to the circle office. The problem is that postings in police are not static and the trained officials get transferred to other divisions. Providing ARF training to all personnel is not always possible. Atiqul Islam said he was not aware of the new format of ARF with 92 points. I have to check that, he said. Meanwhile, at the 20th National Road Safety Council (NRSC) meeting on September 11, 2011, it was decided to create a provision for a monthly update on the number of road accidents. The NRSC has asked the deputy commissioner, superintendent of police, and civil surgeon of each district to prepare a report of road accidents and submit it to the Cabinet every month. This, too, has not been implemented all these years.
