 |
Kathmandu Friday May 11, 2001 Baishakh 28, 2058.
|
Our deadly roads
With 21 people killed and 50 injured in three
separate road accidents on one day last week, the focus is regrettably once again on our
poor road safety record. Measures have been taken to mitigate the situation. Every year
traffic week is duly observed. But all this is not making any dent on this perennial
problem. Accidents keep taking their toll in life and limb with predictable regularity.
Part of the fault seems to be at an attitudinal level, with our pervasive make-do ethos.
But for that, we would long ago have done something serious about it. Not surprisingly,
most of the accident fatalities involve commercial vehicles and ordinary passengers.
Everyone knows that commercial vehicles are as hopelessly overloaded as our roads are
overcrowded. Which means mechanical failure, especially of the brakes, is not uncommon,
and usually fatal.
Policing the traffic and maintaining standards is
difficult because there seems to be an unspoken nexus between vehicle operators and
traffic police. On top of that, up country roads that have bulldozed their way into
hostile topography are difficult to maintain. The monsoon sees to that. There is also a
great deal of kickback involved in road maintenance work which means that each rupee
budgeted for maintenance does not go as far as it should. In one of the accidents last
week a gabion wall collapsed after a bus skidded off the road. The drivers and conductors
of public transport themselves tend to be a brazen lot given to squeezing passengers dry.
They are often not above putting their truck or bus into reverse gear to finish off a
hapless pedestrian whom they might have just run over, to avoid paying for prolonged
medical treatment when they can get away with a relatively modest fine for homicidal
negligence.
All this adds up to a damning indictment of our
public transport system. As more roads open up across the country, and the
Sindhuli-Bardibas artery is one such, these problems will become more acute not less,
unless there is some change in the ground rules. Such change may take the form of more
explicit liabilities and the application of tort law, something in which our legal system
seems to be deficient. Any change in the law might also take into account the liabilities
of the electricity authority. In one of the accidents last week, passengers were
electrocuted when their bus apparently got entangled in a high voltage transmission line.
What a horrendous way to go, even by the standard of our murderous roads.
Other Stories
|
