The government is going ahead with the initiative of January 2024 to enact a law to ensure road safety amid frequent fatal road accidents.
The proposed law is likely to cover all road safety issues although the Road Transport Act, made in 2018 after a countrywide road safety movement, is in force.
Officials said that the proposed law was mainly for road users, including passengers, pedestrians and drivers, while the existing law is more for the transport owners and workers and the regulatory authorities.
In the proposed law, the issues of women, children, elderly people and people with special needs will be addressed significantly, they said.
Some road safety experts, however, doubt the fruitfulness of the proposed law, as the existing laws already in force are rarely enforced.
They suggested enhancing the authorities鈥� institutional capacity to implement the laws and ensure their accountability and good governance.
The road transport ministry, following campaigners鈥� demand for addressing the road safety issues separately, initiated the move by forming a nine-member committee on January 22, 2024 to enact the proposed law to ensure road safety.
A draft of the proposed law had already been submitted to the Road Transport and Highways Division under the Road Transport and Bridges Ministry.
The road transport division held a meeting at its conference room at the secretariat on Monday to begin the review of the draft Road Safety Act, 2025.
One of the division鈥檚 committee members said that the draft law has 15 chapters.
Issues like taking road accident victims quickly to nearby hospitals and compensation for the victims are kept in details in the draft law, the member said.
Many sections of the 2018 law will be overlapped in the proposed law, and it will be mentioned every time in the new law.
The member said that the Monday鈥檚 meeting decided to co-opt four more members, one each from the Bangladesh Police and the Dhaka Ahsania Mission and two academicians, in the division鈥檚 committee.
Several meetings, including inter-ministerial meetings, would be held on the draft law before finalization, the member said.
In 2024, the road transport ministry formed a five-member subcommittee to prepare a draft of the proposed law.
One of the subcommittee members, seeking anonymity, said that the road safety issue was not addressed properly in the 2018 law.
鈥楾here is nothing conflicting in the draft law with the 2018 law,鈥� he said, adding, 鈥業n the draft, we covered all road safety issues mentioned in other policies and made the draft a detailed one.鈥�
The member also said that they were supposed to complete the draft in 2024, but failed to do so in time.
The subcommittee head and Bangladesh Road Transport Authority director, Sitangshu Shekhar Biswas, said that they had earlier submitted the draft to the ministry and then the ministry told them to refine it.
He said that they later submitted the refined draft again to the ministry.
According to the Bangladesh Road Transport Authority, road accidents killed 5,024 people in 2023, 5,480 in 2024 and 2,943 in the first six months this year.
Non-governmental organisation Road Safety Foundation data, however, shows that the number of people killed in road accidents was 6,524 in 2023, 7,294 in 2024 and 3,662 in the first six months this year.
The World Health Organisation estimated the road traffic fatalities in Bangladesh at 21,316 in 2015, at 24,944 in 2018, and at 31,578 in 2021.
Officials of the road authority said that the latest draft had been sent to the road transport division at the end of July this year.
Professor Md Shamsul Hoque, the director of the Accident Research Institute of the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, said that he was frustrated about the proposed law, as the Road Transport Act, 2018, 111-recommendations of a government-formed committee and some other earlier recommendations were rarely implemented.
He said that a new law would not be needed for road safety if the authorities could implement these laws and recommendations.
He expressed his hopelessness that the proposed law would not be implemented even after enactment.
Professor Shamsul blamed the lack of institutional capacity, accountability and good governance among relevant authorities, including the BRTA, for the current fatalities on roads.
鈥榃e need to focus on these weaknesses in the institutions at first,鈥� he added.聽
In September 2011, the then government formed a nine-member expert sub-committee, headed by the then Dhaka University Teachers Association president professor M Anwar Hossain, which put forward 52 short-, mid- and long-term recommendations on the transport sector.
Professor Anwar said that the recommendations were yet to be implemented.
He, however, said that there was a necessity for a new law for road safety.
He observed that enacting a new law would take a long time and that the interim government was unlikely to complete it.
On September 19, 2018, Jatiya Sangsad passed the Road Transport Bill, replacing the Motor Vehicles Ordinance 1983 in the wake of a countrywide student protest after two college students had been killed by a reckless bus in Dhaka on July 29, 2018.
The then road transport minister Obaidul Quader, in the backdrop of transport leaders鈥� demand after a countrywide strike, on February 17, 2019 formed a three-minister committee comprising the then home minister Asaduzzaman Khan, law minister Anisul Huq and railway minister Nurul Islam Sujan, to submit recommendations with respect to the amendments to the 2018 law.
On the same day, Obaidul Quader formed a committee, headed by former shipping minister and the then president of the Bangladesh Road Transport Workers鈥� Federation, Shajahan Khan, to bring order back on roads and control accidents.
The Shajahan Khan-led committee submitted 111 recommendations to the then prime minister Sheikh Hasina on April 28, 2019.
The 2018 law came into effect on November 1, 2019, more than 13 months after it was passed.聽聽聽
The recommendations also mostly remained on paper.
