Unabated transport workers’ crimes

EDITORIAL

FATAL traffic safety condition in Bangladesh is known to all. However, passengers’ lives in the high ways are not only at risk of road accidents, criminal misconduct of the transport workers have been taking lives. The murder, rape and physical assault of passengers in long-route buses has become a common affair. A middle aged woman on Friday, as reported in New Age on Sunday, was killed on a moving bus after pushing her septuagenarian father off the bus on Dhaka-Tangail highway near Ashulia. Law enforcement agencies so far failed to identify the bus operator or the assailants and they suspect that the woman may have been sexually assaulted before murder. In a similar incident, on August 25 2017, Rupa Khatun, a law student was brutally killed after being raped by the bus driver and helpers in a moving bus from Bogra to Mymensingh. Earlier this year, a student of North South University embraced similar fate when he was thrown in a canal from a Chittagong to Dhaka bound bus. The murder of Rupa and Payel shocked the nation and compelled the law enforcement agencies to bring the perpetrators to court, but they failed to prevent such deaths.

Transport workers including drivers and their helpers are recruited arbitrarily. There are no rules of conduct that legally binds the workers to maintain their moral and ethical standards. The transport workers are mostly recruited on a contractual basis. In this system, the drivers and other workers get paid on the basis of the number of trips they have completed. Therefore, they do not enter into any kind of work agreement with their employer that will compel them to adhere to higher ethical standards while in duty. This system also absolves the employers, bus operators of any liability of the action of their employees. Passengers rights activists laments, in a context, where unskilled workers are allowed to ply the road without proper driver’s training, improvement of ethical standards of transport workers are a far cry. For the unruly behaviour of the transport workers, they also blame the politicisation of the sector meaning that the workers are deployed by ruling quarters to create anarchy on the road for political gain and such purposeful use of labour force has only misguided and encouraged them in deviant activities. Therefore, the murder, rape and physical assault of passengers in the hands of transport workers is symptom of a larger problem that has completely rigged the transport sector in the country.

The government, under the circumstances, must immediately improve the training facilities for transport workers with particular emphasis on gender inequality and violence. It is time that the government involving civil society bodies draft a code of conduct for all engaged in the sector. To put an end to the contractual, arbitrary recruitment process, the authorities concerned need to install a recruitment mechanism that will ensure accountability on both worker and transport owners part. 

• Courtesy: New Age /Nov 13, 2018