No check on country’s transport system
Country’s transportation system is in tatters, at least major part of it is. The system lacks checks to monitor its working across the board. Countless vehicles are on roads without being checked whether they are safe to travel, and even the ones those are tested and certified, in most of the cases no regular check-up follows to ensure their condition worth travelling. This leads to accidents, often tragic, like the one that happened the other day in Gujrat district, causing 16 school-going children and their female teacher’s death, and putting at least eight more to hospitals with severe injuries.
The tragic accident is a classic case of negligence, criminal negligence on that, on the part of the driver and road safety authorities. Just to save a few bucks, drivers don’t get their vehicles tested and certified from the relevant departments, particularly the ones in the private commuter and passenger transport sectors. Some of the common sights on Pakistani roads include: people, including school-going children, hanging in the doors and windows of a vehicle; vehicles without properly working headlights, indicators, and hazard lights; use of unapproved, or if approved dangerously placed, CNG or LPG cylinders; overloading; over-speeding etc. However, no one seems to pay any heed to this madness, not the government authorities, not the drivers, and certainly not the passengers. In this particular case, the fitness certificate issued to the van had expired in April 2013. Another major issue is the untrained drivers. Drivers usually are illiterate or only a little educated, so they don’t know much about road safety precautions. Neither are they aware of the various road signs placed for their protection, nor do they follow them when they know what it means. And government authorities blatantly ignore testing their skills periodically, thus letting it become a potential threat to the life of innocent passengers. How they obtain their driving licenses is also another issue which needs to be carefully looked into. Bribe gets them the required license but they still lack the basic understanding that driving is not just a skill, it is also a responsibility, as in a responsibility for the safety of their, their fellow drivers and passengers’ lives.
Reports say that the driver of this tragic accident was carrying a can of fuel meant for school’s generator inside the vehicle and when he tried to switch his dual-fuel van from gas to petrol, it sparked and the can caught fire, making the van a burning inferno for the children. The government has announced compensation for the families of the victims but no amount of compensation can fulfil the gap in the laws and their implementation by the government authorities. Serious action and continuous implementation is what is required right now. On a side note, some sort of training on how to deal with emergency situations should be made a must for all educational institutes. If they had a better idea of what was happening, some of them could have saved their, and perhaps others’, lives, as the two students did who acted on their survival instincts and jumped out of the van in time to save themselves.
