Bangladesh Road Transport Authority (BRTA) has lambasted the World Health Organization (WHO) and Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity, a passenger welfare platform, saying their reports over the number of road accidents and causalities are unreal.
At a press conference at the BRTA office in Dhaka on Tuesday, BRTA Chairman Nur Mohammad Mazumder said that Jatri Kalyan Samity’s report was exaggerated and did not match with data from any government or non-government organisation.
The WHO’s report was based on estimation and it also did not match with ground reality, he claimed.
BRTA is the regulatory body for ensuring road safety and order in the road transport sector in Bangladesh and it publishes the data collected from 64 districts after cross-checking with other stakeholders such as police, district administration, hospitals and mass media, he said.
According to BRTA, as many as 5,024 people died in 5,495 road accidents across the country in 2023 while Jatri Kalyan Samity in a recently released report put the death toll at 7,902 from 6,261 road crashes.
Jatri Kalyan Samity prepared their report by analysing accident reports published in the country's national and regional dailies and online news portals during the period.
BRTA said that 4,475 people lost lives in road accidents in 2023 according to Bangladesh Police’s data while Road Safety Foundation put the number at 6,524. “Which means, Jatri Kalyan Samity data, compared to other government and non-government data, was exaggerated,” Nur said.
BRTA publishes data regularly on its website and it requests all to notify them if any organisation finds unmatched data from anywhere. But Jatri Kalyan Samity did not inform BTRA and that created confusion among people, he added.
Giving examples of the data they collected in the last six years, the BRTA chairman also mentioned that their data did not have much difference with police, Road Safety Foundation and Nirapad Sarak Chai.
‘WHO report unrealistic’
WHO in December last year published a report titled “Global Status Report on Road Safety, 2023”. They also introduced a mobile application named WHO Road Safety Data. They estimated that in 2021, a total of 31,578 people died in road accidents.
That year, police had said that 5,084 people were killed in road accidents, Nirapad Sarak Chai said 4,289, and Road Safety Foundation said 6,284.
BRTA claimed that WHO’s estimation was wrong as it does not prepare such a report by collecting data, rather, it gets an estimation by using a regressing model. Besides, this model is not the same for all countries.
Countries that have a developed system of collecting data and storing them are under category 4. It is not possible to get proper data in that system. As Bangladesh is a densely populated country, the result came unreal for the country, said BRTA.
BRTA also said that before the WHO report was published, BRTA at a stakeholders’ meeting put objection over the estimated death count and requested them to coordinate with the Road Transport and Highways Division, but that was not followed.
BRTA urged all to not use reference to the WHO report’s estimated death toll as it sends a wrong message about the country’s road safety situation.
Motorcycles mostly involved in accidents
According to the BRTA data, in 2023, a total of 7,837 vehicles faced road accidents and of them, 1,747 (22.29 per cent) were motorcycles, leading the chart.
According to the data, 206 cars, 1,083 buses and minibuses, 1,389 trucks and covered vans, 370 pickups, 226 microbuses, 161 ambulances, 230 vans, 128 tractors, 217 easy bikes, 415 battery-run rickshaws, 497 auto rickshaws and 1,168 other vehicles faced road accidents in 2023.
In the year, in 5,495 incidents, 5,024 people were killed and 7,495 people sustained different types of injuries.
In December as well, motorcycles led the chart as 38.11 per cent of deaths (165) happened due to road accidents involving two-wheelers.
A total of 483 accidents took place in December last year across the country, where 433 people were killed and 641 sustained injuries, according to the BRTA.
