It seems Keralites have a tendency of refusing to comply with rules being implemented to ensure the discharge of their duty for public good. That is perhaps the only explanation why Government employees had once protested against installation of punching machines at offices, intended at ensuring punctuality. It is now the turn of private bus owners to follow such path.
A meeting of representatives of private bus owners’ associations held in Kochi on Sunday decided to suspend services across the State for indefinite period starting Monday in protest against the inspections by the police and Motor Vehicle Department officials for speed governors fitted in the buses and cancellation of permits of buses that did not comply with norms.
However, the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD) decided to neglect the strike call given by the bus owners and to go ahead with the inspections. Authorities are convinced that the main reasons for most of the gruesome accidents happening in the State in recent times are over-speed, lack of speed governors in heavy vehicles and refusal to comply with rules.
The police and MVD intensified the inspections after the gruesome road accidents that had occurred in Malappuram district between August 30 and September 7 in which 24 human lives were lost. On Friday last, 14 people, including 11 women, were killed when the over-speeding mini-bus, they were travelling by, hit a tree and fell off the embankment.
In the two-day inspections, the MVD had cancelled the fitness certificates of at least 500 private buses for lack of speed governors or for not complying with traffic norms. On Saturday alone, the department had cancelled permits of 299 buses. The MVD has instructed the owners of these buses to call them off the roads immediately.
Bus owners, however, persist in their claim that accidents are not recurring because of the lack of speed governors or any other fault on their part. The actual culprits are the authorities themselves who fail to ensure construction and maintenance of good roads, implementation of rules in the proper manner and availability of company-provided service for speed governors, they say.
“We are in support of the idea of making speed governors mandatory for heavy vehicles. But this is not practical in the present juncture as the Government has failed to ensure their availability and proper and timely service from the manufacturers. Also, we can’t agree with this “attack” on entire bus services whenever there is an accident,” said a bus owner from Malappuram.
However, Transports Minister Aryadan Muhammad reiterated that the Government won’t compromise on the issue of speed governors. “What the MVD is doing is implementing the existing rules strictly. Alternative arrangements would be made to face the strike. The Government is ready for talks on reasonable matters,” the Minister said.
The Government’s move to strictly implement traffic rules and regulations has come in the context of the recurrence of gruesome accidents which had claimed over 1,900 lives in the first five months of the current year. Malappuram district alone, where Friday’s accident served as an eye-opener, had witnessed 224 deaths in accidents till August.
According to police records, 15,109 of the total 15,717 road accidents that occurred in the State till May 31 this year were caused by over-speeding, lack of alertness on the part of drivers and fitness problems of vehicles. As many as 4,286 people had died in the 36,174 accidents in 2012 in the State. In the previous year, 4,145 people had died in accidents.