Jesmina Shanta
In Bangladesh the majority of the population are women, but their rights are not fulfilled in many cases. Women are not getting their rights due to some people’s disrespectful attitude towards them.
We all have noticed in public busses there are nine seats reserved for the women, children and the disabled community. But the instruction is not followed strictly.
There is a confusion in the instruction label, it should clearly state that the man has to leave his seat at once as any child, woman, or disable passenger appears.
From my own travelling experience I have seen, men who occupy the reserve seats for women, children and disabled people, do not want to give the seat to a woman willingly, as any new woman gets into the bus.
Most of them want the woman to plead them for the seat. But since the seat is reserved, why a woman, child or disabled person should request for it?
Other important thing is, the women are half of the passengers now. And lastly the passengers and the drivers and the helpers of the bus misbehave with the women passengers regularly. The bus conductor does not instruct the male passengers not to sit on the reserved seat. When any argument arises between the man and the woman he doesn’t interfere.
The bus conductor often blocks the bus door and do not allow any woman to get into the bus. The conductors also sometimes push the man or woman who is trying to get into the bus. There are chances of fatal injuries.
When the women wants to get down of the bus, the drivers, often stop the bus in the middle of the busy road, leading her to take serious risk of an accident.
There is no complaint cell in the bus. When the bus stops at a stoppage, the companies staff gets into the bus to collect the chart, but they do not enquire whether there was any misconduct during the travel.
The transport department should look into the problem and increase reserve seats for women in public transports.
The government should monitor all bus companies’ customer service quality and cancel their route permission in case of any negligence. The authority should check the cleanliness of the stoppage from where the bus starts, comfort of the passengers while they make queue and customer friendly behavior of the bus staffs. As most of the bus companies keep the stoppages very dirty, as there is no punishment for this. Most of the private bus companies are plying on the Dhaka roads, without maintaining any services.
