Eid should be our great exhale, a moment when families separated by work and distance finally come home to one another, and the year’s pressures should give way to joy. For millions of people this week, that will come true. But many families will remember this season not for its happiness, but for what they have lost.
On Monday morning, a truck loaded with iron rods overturned into a ditch near the Jamuna Bridge in Tangail. Fifteen people died, including hawkers and labourers from Naogaon, Rajshahi, and Chapainawabganj who had climbed atop the rods because apparently they could not afford the bus fare home. Police believe the driver had fallen asleep at the wheel. Hours later, a hundred kilometres north, a motorcycle carrying Anisur Rahman, his wife Ayesha Begum, and their four-year-old daughter Pushpo was struck by an unidentified vehicle on the Bogura-Rangpur highway. Anisur and Pushpo died at the scene, but the driver fled. These were not even the worst numbers Bangladesh woke up to on Monday, however. In just the 24 hours beforehand, 17 more patients—almost all of them children—died from measles or measles-like symptoms in hospitals, raising the outbreak’s death toll to 545.
On the surface, a road accident and a disease outbreak have little in common. One is sudden and violent; the other is slow and clinical. But they share a structural cause: the persistent failure of the authorities to protect the country’s most vulnerable citizens from risks that are well understood, well documented, and, in both cases, preventable.
Measles is a vaccine-preventable disease, but gaps in national vaccination coverage widened in the years following the Covid-19 pandemic, leaving an entire generation of children exposed. The outbreak was not a surprise; it was a warning ignored. The road deaths follow the same troubling logic. Bangladesh has rules prohibiting passengers from riding on freight vehicles. It has speed limits on national highways. What it lacks, or fails to consistently deploy, is the enforcement machinery to make those rules meaningful. In both tragedies, it is the poor who die. The families who could afford bus tickets were not on the iron rods; the children who received routine vaccinations were far less likely to die from measles. Risk is clearly following the contours of poverty.
The question is what comes next. Health authorities have warned that deaths from measles may continue for several more days as hospitalised children remain critical. The immediate priority must be ensuring that the 4,000 children still in hospital receive adequate care, and that surveillance for new cases remains intensive. On the roads, the changes required are equally specific. Passengers on freight vehicles must be prohibited in practice, with mobile highway courts deployed during peak travel periods. National highways must be covered by CCTV networks capable of identifying hit-and-run vehicles. Finally, accountability must be institutionalised.
Behind every death statistic is a deep and permanent loss. These numbers are the true measure of what Bangladesh’s governance failures actually cost. The roads will fill again during the next Eid. The government can enforce rules before another tragedy strikes. It must also ensure that the vaccination schedule never again faces such deadly disruptions.
