We Demand Safe Road
- lubebd
- Jun 25, 2016
- 2 min read
It sounds as a solid catchphrase, though ‘We Demand Safe Road’ is a social organization dedicated to ensuring safe roads in Bangladesh. As a non-profit organization, this dedicated think tank comprise of around 15 thousand volunteers, perform their responsibility over 70 branches all over the country.
‘We Demand Safe Road’ has been working for the last 23 years to reduce the road accidents. Their mission is to establish a sustainable action program socially to ensure road safety by uniting the government, civil society, foreign donors, NGOs, corporations and common people with their cooperation. And their vision is to create advisory mechanisms for roads free from all accidents. ‘Road accident is possible to reduce by aware common people and by training the drivers and the road users’ is their belief.
According to police statistics, there have been around 3,000 annual traffic related deaths in last 10 years. And the Accident Research Institute of BUET says the annual casualty rate is almost 60 per 10,000 motor vehicles. The police study shows the most vulnerable age group to road accidents are between 21 to 35 years. The yearly national loss has estimated around 5,000-7,000 crore BDT. Almost 30% of the national health care budget is used behind road crash victims incurring a financial loss to our economy equivalent to 2% of our national GDP.
Now ‘We Demand Safe Road’ is a profile on road safety movement, earlier started off its journey on the 1st December, 1993 after the sad demise of prominent film artist Ilias Kanchan’s wife Jahanara Kanchan on road accident. Now, ‘We Demand Safe Road’ is a member of the National Road Safety Council of Bangladesh, Ministry of Communication, BRAC, Accident Research Institute of BUET and other govt. bodies. It is also a working agency of WHO to ensure the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety.
Central Executive Members Committee (CEMC) is the key body of the organization’s function comprised of 9 members with the Chairman Illias Kanchan. These members are enlisted under the NGO affairs Bureau of the Prime Minister’s Office by govt. regulations.
The role of CEMC members is to implement the organizational activities, to ensure their good practice, to find out the root causes of the accidental issues, to promote sustainable initiatives on the issues, to ensure whole-hearted participation of the common people, and to promote the mutual relationship between the organization and other respective bodies.
As an advisory body, ‘We Demand Safe Road’ is working with govt. bodies and alongside common people of Bangladesh to end the road accident.
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