Editorial
Road mishaps galore
Need for highway police reinforced
During the Eid holidays 41 lives were lost to highway and road accidents, making a daily average of ten fatalities. One simply loses count of the numbers of injured and maimed. The pressure of mobility mounting prior to and following festivals, commandeering of dilapidated transports, overloading, speeding, overtaking, putting novices on the driver's seat et all make a lethal combination with accidents just waiting to happen. All of these factors are more or less present at other times, but these make a reappearance during festive occasions with vengeance.
The typical accidents range from head-on collisions and ramming from behind through turning turtle at the bends to sudden break failure and overrunning of pedestrians. Mini-buses, lorries, pick-up vans usually top the list of culprits while motor-cycles, rickshaw vans and pedestrians are extremely prone to mishaps. Certain road junctions or bends have been scenes of frequent accidents pointing the finger to road engineering and design faults which have already been identified by experts but no action has been taken to repave the roads at the hazardous points.
With such known patterns of accidents, all manner of experts have reeled off volumes of recommendations to repair the ever widening fault lines. Let's concentrate on what we believe to be the central point of concern. There couldn't be a worse indictment on governance failure than the apathy shown in building up highway police units without which any notion of applying traffic rules on the inter-district roads and highways is utter nonsense. Yet, this obvious necessity has been patently ignored as is evidenced from the fact that even though a highway police squad with a paraphernalia of personnel, transports and gadgets was launched a few years ago, it simply petered out into oblivion almost in no time. The half-baked plan naturally foundered on the rock of the highway squad being attached to the district police authority instead of having a separate identity with delegated authority and well defined field of competence. The net result was that the transport fleet, the better and quality part of it, found its way into already pampered hands like carrying coal to New Castle.
The bottom line is we should have a fully fledged highway police force to keep vigil on the highways which would have the double dividend of not just curbing accidents but also controlling crimes.
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