On 29 July 2018, a bus ran over homebound schoolchildren waiting on the sidewalk in the Kurmitola area of northern Dhaka. Two students of Shaheed Ramiz Uddin Cantonment School and College, Dia Khanam Mim (17) and Abdul Karim Rajib (18), died; several more were rushed to the hospital. Deaths like that of Mim and Rajib's are commonplace enough that Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan felt no qualms about making a cavalier response to the deaths. When asked about the dead children, Khan made light of it, saying, "[Yesterday] 33 people died in India's Maharashtra [state] in an accident. Do they talk about these issues like us?' The video of his blasé response went viral on social media. None of this was any different from the usual cycle of such events in Bangladesh. But then, something remarkable happened. Uniformed schoolchildren took to the streets in grief, in rage, and they refused to go home.
The transport sector is a succinct snapshot of how corruption and nepotism endanger the everyday lives of people. The majority of buses that ply the streets aren't roadworthy, most drivers are underage and untrained, and speeding buses are the norm, even on busy streets. With their livelihoods determined by the number of passengers they ferry, drivers race each other, and traffic violations are often settled through bribes. Drivers and conductors have no fixed wages and often pay a rental to the bus owners. When accidents happen, it is the driver and conductor who are held responsible. The father of Mim, the girl who was killed, is a long-haul bus driver himself. He's been driving for 30 years and is a former executive member of the Dhaka District Bus and Minibus Workers' Union. In an interview with the Daily Star, he spoke of profit-driven, corrupt hiring practices giving unskilled drivers the "license to kill'.
Shipping Minister Shajahan Khan rose in politics through his involvement with workers' unions and is the current executive president of the Bangladesh Road Transport Workers' Federation. Although called unions, many of these workers' federations are backed by and function at the owners' behest, rarely playing a role in furthering workers' rights. (See our essay on the state of labour unions in Bangladesh.) Transport workers continue to work inhumane hours for low wages, endure unsafe working conditions, and lack job security. Media reports connect many politicians, and not only those connected to the ruling party, to ownership of transportation companies either directly or through family members – which is why no government has been able to clean up this sector, leaving citizens at their mercy.
Disproportionate force