The United Nations Decade of Action on Road Safety will be launched today in Bangladesh where road accidents kill at least 10 people a day and injure eight to 10 times more.
The government targets to almost halve such deaths and injuries between 2011 and 2020 by a series of events mainly focused on awareness campaign and building trauma management centres.
The event will be kicked off at 300 places across the globe on the day.
The health ministry will spearhead the inter-ministerial approaches to check colossal damages of road mishaps, director general for
health Khondhaker Mohammad Shefyetullah told reporters at a briefing in the capital on Tuesday.
However, there is no specific policy to ensure safety of the pedestrians, although 54 per cent of the total road accident deaths are pedestrians.
The DG said steps would be taken to change the behaviour of road users but was in no position to specify what and when.
Qazi Zakaria Islam, an analyst with Accident Research Institute at the Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology, told the news agency that priorities should focus on the country's need.
'We should ensure pedestrians' safety and drivers' training,' he said, adding that only awareness is not enough. 'If there is no pavement, then where will people walk after being aware?'
Even in district towns, there is no pavement to walk on, he pointed out.
According to ARI, head-on and rear-end collisions are also very common on the streets after pedestrians death, accounting for 13 per cent and 11 per cent of total accidents.
But these accidents could be checked by putting central reservations and widening some parts of roads, the research institute suggests.
The DG health said they would take concerted steps to check the accident menace. Eight ministries including the communications ministry will work together during the decade-long action programme.
He pointed out diarrhoea afflicts thousands of people, but death rate is almost nil. But road mishaps kill thousands of people and cripple families.
'Together we can save millions of lives,' he said, adding that Bangladesh loses nearly Tk 40 billion each year to road accidents.
District and upazila hospitals will be equipped with trauma management facilities through the decade, he said.
AKM Jafar Ullah, chief of Bangladesh programmes of the Decade of Action on Road Safety, said it was a way forward.
'We will be able to prevent 5 million road accident deaths and 50 million injuries between 2011 and 2020,' he announced.
Nazmul Karim, national consultant, World Health Organisation, said the decade-long plan provided an overall framework for activities that included road safety management, safer vehicles, changing road users' behaviours and post-crash care.
The United Nations General Assembly on March 2, 2010 unanimously decided to take action on road safety in the next decade (2011 to 2020).
Source: New Age
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