Sayeed Muhammad: Khurshid Alam says he pulls 17-hour shifts three days a week driving a private bus in Dhaka, where tens of thousands of students held angry protests for over a week demanding an end to rash driving that killed two teenagers late last month.
The government has moved swiftly to defuse the protests that were threatening to spiral, with an eye on general elections due by the end of the year, reports Reuters. On Monday, the cabinet approved raising the maximum jail time for rash driving deaths to five years from three.
Overworked and underpaid drivers like Alam are often blamed for Bangladesh’s high traffic casualty rate – road accidents kill or injure at least five people an hour in the country – and the resentment against them has been aggravated by the deaths of the two students last Friday.
Most bus drivers do not get paid monthly salaries but earn commissions based on the number of passengers picked, leading them to race each other for passengers.
The two students were killed when the driver of a bus speeding to pick up passengers ahead of other buses in a congested part of Dhaka lost control and ploughed into the bus stop, a court heard this week.
Dhaka city has been paralysed by angry students since then, although the protests have now tapered off. Police have fired tear gas and used water cannon to disperse protesters, as students stopped vehicles, to check drivers’ licences and their vehicles’ roadworthiness.
“I start driving at 6 am and continue up to 11 pm,” said Alam, 45, as he got ready for a trip on his green and ash bus with a cracked windshield, in a city teeming with scuffed up buses and beaten-up, used cars.
Alam said he had reported the cracked windshield to the bus owner, but it was yet to be replaced.
About 4,000 people were killed in driving deaths in Bangladesh in 2017 and 2,350 in the first seven months of this year, according to data compiled by the Accident Research Institute at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology.
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