A unified digital system could make Bangladesh’s roads safer

This Eid ul Fitr, as families were returning to Dhaka after the holiday, a bus plunged into the Padma River at Daulatdia ferry terminal. It was waiting to board a ferry when it fell. 26 people died — five of them children, 11 of them women, all of them someone's reason to come home. 

The government announced compensation of Tk25,000 per family. The Road Transport Minister issued no public statement. BRTA accepted no responsibility. No one was punished. Within days, the grief had moved off the front pages and the system had returned, without embarrassment, to normal. 

I picked up my pen because silence at this point is not neutrality. It is complicity.

Rahim left Narsingdi at dawn. He was twenty-three, a bus helper earning three thousand taka a week, sending half to his mother in Mymensingh. His name was not registered anywhere. The bus had no GPS. The driver's licence had never been verified against any national record. Nobody knew they were on that highway until the bus overturned near Shibpur. Rahim was dead before any ambulance found them. Three weeks later, his wife sold their television. A month after that, she left her daughter with a neighbour and took a job at a garment factory. The school fees could not wait for grief.

This is not an exceptional story. It is the architecture.

Bangladesh loses between eight thousand and thirty thousand people on its roads every year — the range itself is damning. The Bangladesh Jatri Kalyan Samity, which monitors accidents through nationwide media and field data, recorded 7,902 deaths in 2023. The World Health Organization's Global Status Report on Road Safety puts the figure at 31,578 for 2021. The Bangladesh Road Transport Authority's own annual report recorded 5,024 for the same period. Three institutions, three wildly different numbers, zero agreement. When a country cannot count its dead, it cannot protect its living.

The economic cost compounds the human one. The World Bank, in its 2022 report on traffic injuries in lower and middle-income countries, estimates that road crashes cost Bangladesh up to 5.1% of GDP annually. This is not a transport problem. It is a national haemorrhage.

The solution is not more enforcement. It is visibility.

Bangladesh needs a Unified National Transport Platform — a single digital layer connecting every driver, every vehicle, every route, every fare, and every passenger into one accountable ecosystem. Not another app. Not another pilot. Infrastructure.

The starting point is identity. Every driver and helper registers through eKYC, linked to the national ID system. Every bus owner registers their fleet — route permits, fitness certificates, tax status, ownership records — in one live database. For the first time, a regulator could know, in real time, how many unfit buses are operating on a given highway. Today, that answer does not exist. The World Bank's 2021 appraisal report, prepared for financing a road safety project in Bangladesh, observed that the country's system of recording and reporting crashes is cumbersome, error-prone, and unfit for benchmarking. The data vacuum is not a limitation of technology. It is a consequence of design — a system built without the ambition to see itself clearly.

Once the state knows who Rahim is, it can invest in him. The same platform can deliver training directly to a driver's phone — Bangla-language modules on defensive driving, emergency response, and fatigue management. Helpers can learn first aid. Drivers earn certifications that unlock better routes and lower insurance costs. When a cyclone warning is issued or a highway floods, alerts reach every registered operator instantly. This communication layer does not currently exist. It should.

The financial layer is equally transformative. Passengers purchase tickets and travel insurance in a single transaction through existing digital payment rails such as bKash or Nagad. Cash flows that currently disappear into informal channels become traceable and taxable. Drivers, for the first time, build a verifiable financial history — opening access to credit, savings, and insurance products that have always been structurally out of reach for them.

Accountability stops being someone's job and becomes the system's default. After each journey, passengers rate the driver and the vehicle. Over time, that record becomes reputational equity for good drivers and documented liability for dangerous ones. The system does not rely on constant enforcement; it aligns incentives so that safer behaviour is economically rewarded. The same ecosystem funds what Bangladesh's highways still lack at scale: roadside emergency response. Rapid-response units, positioned along high-risk corridors and dispatched through the same digital layer, can close the gap between accident and ambulance — the minutes that often decide survival.

There are lessons from elsewhere worth reading carefully. In Kenya, early attempts to digitise the Matatu public transport system failed when imposed from the top down — operators resisted, the model collapsed within eighteen months. Success came later by building on M-Pesa, already used by ninety percent of Kenyans, and growing through incentives rather than mandates. According to O-CITY, the automated fare collection provider that led the second effort, the platform scaled to over ten thousand Matatu buses — a tenfold increase from its pilot. The lesson is not to copy the technology. It is to design around the realities of drivers, operators, and passengers — not against them.

Bangladesh already has the foundations. Platforms like Shohoz and BDTickets show that passengers will buy tickets digitally. Mobile financial services have already brought millions into formal economic systems. According to BRTA and Bangladesh Bureau of Statistics vehicle registration data, the number of registered vehicles has grown four to five times in the past nine years, while infrastructure and enforcement capacity have lagged far behind. 

The Road Safety Foundation Bangladesh reported over 200 deaths during the Eid ul Fitr travel window of March 2026 alone — a figure that excludes the hundreds more injured and the thousands of families quietly absorbing losses that no compensation notice will reach. More than three million people suffer non-fatal road injuries every year in this country, the WHO estimates — injuries that turn into medical debt, lost income, and permanent hardship for families with no safety net.

This is the cost of fragmentation. Every year without a unified system is another year of invisible workers, unmonitored vehicles, uninsured passengers, and uncounted deaths.

The families of those who died at Daulatdia received Tk25,000 each. A sum that cannot bury the grief, fund the schooling, or answer the question every family is left holding: why did no one know that bus was dangerous, and why did no one come?

Rahim did not need a revolution. He needed a system that knew his name, trained his hands, protected his life — and when the road took him, sent someone.

Sketch: TBS

Md Mahmudul Hasan is a digital banking and fintech strategist focused on financial inclusion, platform innovation, and emerging markets.

Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed in this article are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the opinions and views of The Business Standard.