AS BANGLADESH observes National Road Safety Day 2025, the grim reality on its roads exposes the hollowness of official slogans and failures of successive governments to make meaningful changes. Despite repeated promises and millions of takas spent on awareness campaigns, roads remain death traps — chaotic, corrupt and criminally neglected. Over the past 12 years, at least 1,16,726 people have been killed and more than 1,65,000 have become injured in nearly 68,000 road accidents, according to the Passenger Welfare Association of Bangladesh. The numbers provided by the Road Transport Authority and the police are conservative but still significantly high. From January 2023 to September this year, as Road Transport Authority data show, accidents claimed 14,654 lives and left 19,010 others injured — a staggering toll that underscores how deadly the transport system has become. The interim government has taken an initiative to take unfit vehicles off the road, but the process is slow. Instead of ensuring an effective implementation of the road safety project, the government has reduced the already allocated financial resources which suggest that the reform in the transport sector is not its priority.
The Road Transport Authority, the agency responsible for vehicle fitness and driver licensing, remains mired in inefficiency and corruption. Only 5 per cent of road accident victims and their families have received compensation since the scheme was launched in 2022. Meanwhile, unfit vehicles, untrained drivers and unauthorised battery-run rickshaws continue to dominate roads and highways with impunity. For decades, the road transport sector has been a site of political patronage and profiteering. Transport associations, often aligned with ruling parties, operate beyond regulations, collecting illegal tolls and dictating terms to passengers. The law enforcement agencies turn a blind eye to extortion and reckless driving while ordinary citizens pay with their life. The Awami League regime entrenched this nexus of power and impunity, but the interim government has so far failed to dismantle it. Equally troubling is the government’s neglect of a multimodal transport policy. Bangladesh once relied primarily on railways and waterways. But misguided development priorities, often driven by donor prescriptions and domestic corruption, have skewed the balance towards roads for decades. The result is an overstretched, unsafe road network that has become both a lifeline and a death trap.
Given the circumstances, the government should heed the demands of passenger rights advocates and undertake a comprehensive restructuring of the Road Transport Authority to eliminate corruption and ensure accountability in licensing, vehicle inspection and enforcement. The government should revive and expand the water and railway systems, restrict unsafe and unauthorised vehicles and strengthen post-accident response systems. Above all, road safety should be treated not as a symbolic annual observance but as a national emergency.