Holiday deaths on the road

There have been all kinds of disasters: Head-on collision, three vehicles going out of control and mangling each other, bus hitting a motorcycle or autorickshaw from behind, a car ramming against a tree or nose-diving into a ditch, so on and so forth. Even pedestrians were overrun.

These accidents were just waiting to happen. To top off our poor road safety standards routinely causing mishaps round the year, there has been the holiday slack on the part of law-enforcers and transport managers and operators. That the people would be desperate to visit their village homes during Eid holidays and might lower their guard to some extent should have been the basic assumptions behind arranging transport services for them guaranteeing adequate road safety.

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To meet the mounting commutation needs of citizens during a festival, all kinds of vehicles, even jalopies, are pressed into service by road merchants. Is there any monitoring or supervision of the road-worthiness of the vehicles put to use and the qualifications of drivers plying them?

All these underscore the over-arching necessity for averting the massive seasonal callousness by having a highway safety strategy in place during festival times. The BRTA, transport owners and the still amorphous highway patrol police which ought to come into play without any loss of time, should be able to put a brake on the road accidents galore. Let's not forget, our accidents are still very largely man-made.