Bring all culprits to justice for Shibchar road crash

This is how lives are being perished on the roads, sometime it is due to the fault of the drivers; sometime it is due to the faulty vehicles or faulty road infrastructure and at other time it is due to the negligence of the relevant government authorities as well as the law enforcing agencies to enforce the traffic rules. Accidents on the roads do not happen without any cause. There is no reason to take accidents just as accidents in Bangladesh.
The Saturday’s accident on the Dhaka-Bhanga expressway in Shibchar of Madaripur that took away 19 lives, it was clearly the bus which was at fault. As the bus’s registration or route permit was suspended last November following an accident, it should not have been on the highway. But for reasons which are not hard to imagine, the bus used to carry passengers.
Did not the traffic police know that this bus was illegally plying on the road? Moreover, the fitness certificate of the bus also expired on January 18. According to police, the wheel of the bus could not bear the load of the high speed on the expressway. Therefore, the guilt on the part of the owner of the bus is all too certain.
After Saturday’s fatal crash, even the BRTA chairman reportedly confirmed that the registration and route permit of the bus were suspended as a punishment. Despite that, the bus of Emad Paribahan was on the road. Therefore, we construe, beside the owner of the bus, that the BRTA will also have to share the guilt for the accident, since it failed to enforce its own order.
As human lives are perhaps the cheapest things in Bangladesh, we are sure, as our past experience goes, nothing will change on the roads: accidents will occur as frequently as ever claiming scores of lives every week and every month. The owner of the bus is not alone responsible. For Saturday’s accident, if all guilty people at the BRTA and the highway police could have been fired from their job, we could have expected change. In absence of punishment for the wrong, these murders — don’t call them accidents — will take place on the roads.