EDITORIAL: Death is inevitable but how it comes does generate a question whether it was natural or accidental. This past Sunday was the day when 41 persons died in a road accident and 11 drowned in a lake. On that day there was also an accident as a speedy car hit a tree after colliding with a motorcycle, causing seven deaths.
It’s indeed a very large number of accidental deaths on a single day. The newspapers had therefore placed this news on their front pages. In this regard, it is important to note that road accidents, mainly because of ramshackle roads, poor signalling systems, overspeeding and reckless driving, have earned Pakistan a weird distinction of being the first in Asia in fatal and non-fatal road accidents.
According to a WHO (World Health Organisation) data published in 2020, the number of road traffic accident-related deaths in Pakistan reached 28,170 or 1.93 percent of total deaths in the country. 43 percent of these accidents were fatal.
The bus carrying 44 passengers coming from Pishin to Karachi via Quetta, a night-long journey, rammed into a pillar of a bridge near Cheneki in Bela tehsil before it fell down the ravine. It instantly caught fire, which roasted alive 41, with nothing in the area to control the fire. The questions what actually happened, why the bus hit the pillar and whether the driver was asleep after a long journey have no clear answers.
Is it a fact that the instant conflagration was caused by the presence of tins of smuggled oil on the bus? We don’t think we would know the whole truth about the cause.
Equally painful is to realise that the boat that sank in Tanda Dam lake near Kohat along with 15 young seminary students this past Sunday was as much a man-made tragedy as possibly it could be.
The boat was overloaded; no one was wearing the mandatory life jacket that keeps one afloat in water and as the boat overturned no one was on the shore to reach out to the drowning picnickers.
As if recklessness is in our genes; we as a people have no respect for the law which ensures compliance with safety precautions. For the picnickers on lakes and other bodies of water wearing a life jacket should be made mandatory.
Is anybody listening to the wails of the children who drowned in the Tanda Dam lake? Is there no one to notice that buses overspeed, overturn and burn to ashes? What happened this past Sunday is unacceptable. Somebody must be held responsible for these grim tragedies.
Copyright Business Recorder, 2023
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