When deaths arrive on schedule each year: Why Bangladesh fails to curb fatalities on the road during Eid
The script is familiar enough to be called tradition. Eid arrives, millions flood the roads, rails and rivers to reach their villages, and bodies begin to accumulate
Much like previous years, this Eid too arrived with somber news for many families.
At least 274 people lost their lives and more than 1,500 were injured in road accidents nationwide during the 10-day Eid-ul-Fitr travel period, according to the Road Safety Foundation (RSF). These casualties resulted from 342 accidents between 16 and 26 March.
Data from the Bangladesh Passenger Welfare Association, which included death tolls from 14 March to 27 March, recorded 309 fatalities and 902 injuries caused by 304 road accidents.
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Some of the accidents, which were caught on video, were shocking.
Take the case of the 25 March accident for instance. As people were returning to Dhaka after the seven-day holiday, a bus plunged into the Padma River at Daulatdia ferry terminal in Rajbari district, killing at least 26 people — among them five children and 11 women.
Days earlier, a train rammed into a bus in Cumilla, killing 12 and injuring 26. By the time passenger-rights groups tallied the broader Eid travel window, the deaths had once again climbed into the hundreds.
The responses include familiar expressions of grief, promises of inquiry, a few mobile-court drives, and then silence.
As Saidur Rahman, executive director of RSF, puts it, the deeper problem is that the state does not feel compelled to answer for it. "These accidents are going beyond tolerance," he said, "but the authorities do not have to be accountable; there are no demotions and nobody is taking responsibility."
For comparison, during last year's Eid-ul-Fitr holidays, 249 people were killed and 553 injured in 257 road accidents.
The script is familiar enough to be called tradition. Eid arrives, millions flood the roads, rails and rivers to reach their villages, and bodies begin to accumulate.
A pattern that is not a mystery
The same typology of accidents recurs year after year with numbing consistency — buses losing control, trains colliding with buses at level crossings, motorcycles skidding on highways, drivers pushing through the night without rest.
This year, motorcycles alone accounted for nearly 43% of all road accidents during the Eid period, killing at least 151 people — even though authorities have known for years where the risks lie.
Mozammel Hoque Chowdhury, secretary general of Bangladesh Passenger Welfare Association, questions the effectiveness of driver training and vehicle fitness certification, pointing to weak oversight and lack of meaningful audits. "Their audit system needs to be audited," he said.
Saidur Rahman presented a more blunt diagnosis.
The problem, he said, begins with "the culture of not being punished, the culture of being free from responsibility."
He pointed to the Daulatdia ferry terminal tragedy and asked the questions that routinely disappear after the funerals, "Has the Road Transport Minister given any statement regarding the bus that sank… has the BRTA accepted any responsibility? No. Has anyone been punished? No."
As long as that culture remains, he said, "the roads will not be safe".
That sense of repetition runs through the numbers as much as through the crashes themselves. The year changes. The mode of grief does not.
The death toll, meanwhile, is almost certainly undercounted. While official data from BRTA and police put annual fatalities far lower, international and civil-society estimates have long suggested the real number is dramatically higher.
Political economy of the public transport sector
The more revealing question is not why accidents happen — the proximate causes are not disputed.
Drivers work too long without rest. Vehicles operate with mechanical faults. Unfit buses stay on the road. Unlicensed or underqualified drivers are allowed to continue driving on the roads.
The better question is: Why, after so many Eids and so many warnings, does the state still behave as though each disaster is an unfortunate surprise?
Rahman argued, "It is not possible to make the roads of Bangladesh safe with this management. Extensive structural reforms have to be made to these relevant institutions."
What exists now, in his view, is an arrangement so hollowed out that the institutions nominally responsible for road safety barely perform those functions anymore.
"This BRTA should be abolished," he said. "It has become a mere licensing authority. It is no longer a road transport control authority."
That argument fits neatly into the broader political economy. The transport sector is organised around protecting owners, political interests and patronage networks.
A 2024 TIB study showed that nearly 92% of registered bus owners were associated with political parties, with 80% linked to the then-ruling party. It also noted that older reform efforts were repeatedly frustrated by networks of owners, syndicates, unions, police and political actors. In that light, the annual Eid bloodshed begins to look less like administrative weakness than a kind of governance choice.
A 2024 Transparency International Bangladesh (TIB) study showed that nearly 92% of registered bus owners were associated with political parties, with 80% linked to the then-ruling party. It also notes that older reform efforts were repeatedly frustrated by networks of owners, syndicates, unions, police and political actors.
In that light, the annual Eid bloodshed begins to look less like administrative weakness than a kind of governance choice.
The shortage everyone knows about
The shortage of safe, quality public transport — which pushes people towards dangerous options — is a regular yet avoidable problem. Rahman said the government could have deployed a portion of its own large fleet with special management. "Then the shortage of quality buses will be fulfilled, and the accidents will decrease. The government didn't do that."
Passengers are not choosing risk in a vacuum. They are being funnelled into risk by a transport system that cannot or will not safely absorb the surge in Eid mobility. When tens of millions of people are trying to move within a compressed span of days, the absence of regulated, sufficient and fit transport is not a neutral condition. It becomes a producer of death.
Md Hadiuzzaman, professor of Civil Engineering at BUET and former director of the Accident Research Institute (ARI), believes the main reason for the accidents starts with the crisis in public transport. "The capacity to carry so many passengers is actually beyond our entire system — whether it's rail, road, or water."
For Hadiuzzaman, investment concentration in Dhaka is a big problem. "By concentrating investment in Dhaka, we've brought people from all over the country here. Naturally, they will return home during Eid," he said.
That mass exodus — often 1.5 crore people within a few days — overwhelms a system that was never built to handle it. Transport owners cannot maintain idle fleets year-round for a seasonal surge. Regulators cannot suddenly impose discipline on a system stretched beyond capacity.
"The only sustainable solution," Hadiuzzaman argued, "is to move investment outside Dhaka and create employment there so people don't have to migrate in the first place. Otherwise, this crisis will never go away."
Rahman also broadened the indictment beyond BRTA.
The police, he said, are in the same condition. BRTC, too, has drifted from any meaningful public-service role. In a long and unusually pointed criticism, he argued that buses bought with public money should be transporting the public, not being leased out to institutions while Eid passengers scramble for safe travel options.
"BRTC buses were not bought for leasing them," he said. "This was bought with people's tax money. This will transport people."
That is more than a policy complaint. It is a window into the state's priorities. Even where public assets exist, they are not marshalled around the obvious, predictable emergency that Eid travel becomes every year.
When the regulated turn into regulators
Mozammel Hoque Chowdhury describes a regulatory system that has effectively surrendered to the very actors it is meant to control. "Those who are supposed to take action are in bed with the owners," he said. "Gradually, the owners grow into a sort of 'mafia'."
In his telling, the problem is not simply weak enforcement, but a captured system. Owners and labour leaders sit alongside ministers and officials in decision-making spaces, shaping policies from within. "If you look at problems through the 'spectacles' provided by the owners," he said, "everything will be seen through their lens."
The consequence is that discipline collapses before it can be imposed.
This aligns with what Hadiuzzaman identifies as a deeper institutional breakdown. "Those who are supposed to be regulated have now become the regulators," he said, pointing to their presence in bodies like the National Road Safety Council and route permit committees. "If that happens, the sector will naturally become chaotic. That is where we are now."
The result is a system where responsibility diffuses so completely that no one bears it. "An audit is necessary," Mozammel said, "but we see major negligence. The government is not just for the owners — it is for the people. Yet in every activity, it keeps only the owners and labour leaders close."
The accountability vacuum
Bangladesh's road-safety architecture is fragmented almost to the point of design. BRTA checks fitness, highway police monitor enforcement, the Roads and Highways Department handles road conditions, owners are supposed to ensure rest and compliance. When a crash happens, responsibility disperses across institutions so effectively that no one bears it.
So any negligence regarding road safety is not isolated but part of a system. As Rahman repeatedly said that nobody is punished for negligence, so everybody learns that nothing serious follows mass death on the roads.
This is why the yearly post-Eid cycle feels so ritualised. Bangladesh has no shortage of councils, committees, plans, recommendations, press briefings or action points. What it lacks is enforcement against actors powerful enough to resist it. We are left with outrage, promises, inquiries whose findings rarely matter, and then a return to normal.
The problem is not simply that the roads are unsafe. It is that the state has settled into a mode where such deaths no longer generate institutional alarm equal to their scale. The bodies accumulate but the files do not move.
And so the question is who benefits from nothing going right. Those who took to the streets in 2018 demanding safer roads were confronting not just negligence but an entrenched political-industrial order with every incentive to preserve the current arrangement. Eight years later, the dead are still proving them right.
While authorities were contacted for comments, they directed TBS towards a press release issued on 27 March by the Ministry of Road Transport and Bridges.
According to the release, following urgent directives from the Prime Minister on 24 March regarding road safety and traffic management, a high-level meeting is scheduled for 29 March at the Bangladesh Secretariat.
Chaired by Road Transport and Bridges Minister Sheikh Rabiul Alam, the session aims to review progress on safety measures and traffic discipline to reassure the public of the government's commitment to reducing accidents.
For now though, we have 274 people who will never return home to their families again. And unless authorities break this pattern, there will be more next Eid.
