Editorial
Deaths in river again!
High time we implement rules
River travel used to be the safest mode of travel in Bangladesh. Not any longer. It seems that the number of disasters on the waterways is keeping pace with road accidents in the country. Over a period of one week two horrible launch disasters have cost the lives of nearly two hundred people.
And, of course, as usual there will be a committee to enquire into the causes of the accident, and a report will be duly submitted to the appropriate authority, and as surely as not, there will be, unfortunately, repetition of such disasters, because the recommendations and the suggested remedial measures will not get implemented for some reason or the other.
The public transport system has remained a neglected area particularly the passenger safety aspect, and reportedly there is collusion between the owners and the monitoring agencies that look the other way and allow transgressions and the flouting of rules for monetary profit.
The Kishoreganj motorboat / trawler accident is a case in point where reportedly the two vessels were, in the first place, manned by inexperienced operators. Apart from that, the propensity to overload the launches and motorboats and trawlers, with the authorities deliberately looking the other way, is most often the cause of accidents. We have several very recent reports where vessels using major river ports in the country under full supervision of IWTA personnel, carried passengers more than double their authorised capacity, apart from the fact that the river routes were full of river crafts of all definitions carrying passengers, most of them unauthorised.
Given that our waterways are the most frequented and naturally the more commonly used routes of travel, the sheer apathy and neglect of the monitoring agencies to ensure that rules and regulations are followed while plying river vessels, make nonsense of the government's bounden duty to ensure public safety.
It is regrettable that the launch operators continue to defy restrictions on load capacity. One is not aware of any launch operator or owner being punished for deaths due to negligence or willful disregard of the rules. We are not aware of any official being punished for failing in their duty to implement the rules. We are not aware of anyone taken to task for giving unfit vessels permission to ply.
Bad operators, vessels that are not river worthy and overloading are the main causes of river disasters. And these are not difficult to prevent. If only those who are responsible to ensure public safety performed their jobs with due diligence and did not fall for grafts, if only the owners put lives of people over extra-profit motive and the administration acted quickly to make sure that the errant persons were made examples of so many lives would be saved.
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