Unsafe roads

In the last three days, at least 14 people have lost their lives with hundreds more injured in road accidents right across the country. Most notable among them was Monday’s passenger bus accident at Daunne, Nawalparasi when six people were killed and 21 suffered severe injuries. On the same day, Executive Director of Foreign Employment Promotion Board Sthaneshwor Devkota and another person accompanying him were killed when the jeep they were traveling in skidded off the road at Jurikhet, Makawanpur. A day earlier, two people were killed and 24 injured in another passenger bus accident at Yagyabhumi, Dhanusha; four more were killed and 44 injured in yet another passenger bus accident at Bhadurtar, Nuwakot. And horrific as they might sound, these four were only the most prominent of the countless other road accidents occurring with troubling frequency all over the country.



It will be foolhardy to dismiss this spate of accidents as fluke. If we turn over road accident records of the last few years, we find a similarly troubling trend. We believe the increasing number of accidents over the last few years point to some clear lapses, both on the part of the state as well as the operators of public transportation. One of the big causes of accidents in Nepal is the poor condition of its roads. Even major highways like Mahendra Highway (Kakarbhitta-Mahendranagar) and Prithvi Highway (Kathmandu-Pokhara-Baglung), the vital arteries in a country that by and large relies on road for passenger and goods transportation, are in a bad shape: potholed and often impeded by the debris from landslides on the rocky, barren hills flanking them. The other perennial problem on Nepali highways has been over-speeding: most accidents take place either when a vehicle tries to overtake another or when the inebriated driver loses control at the wheels.



The country is not short in rules and regulations governing vehicular traffic. There are laws barring drunk driving, overcrowding and over-speeding, but lax enforcement mechanisms have meant that these laws are more often flouted than followed. Another problem is that, all over the country, various transport syndicates have sprung up, which prevent the entry of new transport entrepreneurs who might introduce new vehicles and provide added facilities to the passengers. But as only a handful of operators have colluded to dividing the spoils among themselves, they have been able to set arbitrary standards on the number and operating conditions of vehicles.

Traffic accidents have become so common that it is easy to overlook the scale of the crisis. In 2011, more 2,527 people lost their lives on Nepali roads, 1.7 percent of all deaths in the country. Like inclement weather, road accident is a subject that people conveniently ignore because the topic has become so mundane. But ignoring such a big cause of mortality in the country is no longer an option. With a little more commitment we believe it is still possible to significantly cut down the loss of unnecessary lives on Nepali roads.

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