Deaths of students in road crashes are continuing. In the seven and a half years from 2019 to June 2026, 7,364 students died on the roads — 15.11 percent of all those killed in road crashes. The figures come from the Road Safety Foundation, an organisation that works on road accidents.
In monitoring student deaths in road crashes, the organisation found that 45.19 percent of those killed were aged between 5 and 17. The total number of students killed in that age group is 3,328. They are school and madrasa students. College and university students aged 18 to 25 accounted for 4,036 deaths, or 54.81 percent of the total.
The Road Safety Foundation’s review said younger students were killed when struck or run over by auto-rickshaws, motorbikes and goods vehicles on their way to and from school and while playing near their homes. These crashes occurred more often on rural roads.
Students aged 13 to 25, by contrast, were killed more often as motorbike riders and passengers. These crashes occurred more often on regional roads and highways.
Cyclists were killed more often on rural and regional roads when struck by three-wheelers, motorcycles and unsafe goods vehicles. Deaths have also occurred through personal carelessness, such as a scarf or clothing becoming caught in the wheel of an auto-rickshaw.
The executive director of the Road Safety Foundation, Saidur Rahman, said students are the country’s group of boundless promise, and young people are its working group. Both these classes of people are dying on the roads in greater numbers. Unless this can be stopped, he said, it will not be possible to build a prosperous Bangladesh in future.
He said the problem cannot be solved by making speeches. It requires a sustainable transport strategy and its strict implementation. Interest groups maintain disorder on the roads to serve their own corruption and extortion. The government must work above their pressure, he said.
The picture of student deaths
By the Road Safety Foundation’s count, a total of 48,713 people died in road crashes across the country in the past seven and a half years.
Of the 7,364 students killed, 693 died in 2019, 719 in 2020 and 936 in 2021. The highest figure in the seven and a half years was 1,385 students killed in 2022. In 2023, 1,153 students were killed.
In 2024 and 2025 student deaths were 1,073 and 1,014 respectively. In the past six months, 391 students have lost their lives in road crashes.
Beyond these, 1,237 students were killed by trains while crossing the railway line carelessly or while walking along the track using headphones.
Causes and recommendations
The Road Safety Foundation has set out seven important causes of deaths in road crashes, and seven recommendations to address them. On the main causes, the foundation cited defective roads and unsafe vehicles; a lack of awareness about road use; the absence of road safety training in educational institutions; the absence of awareness campaigns on road safety in the media; a tendency among students towards reckless motorbike riding; a tendency not to know or observe traffic law; and an unhealthy political culture.
To address these, the Road Safety Foundation recommends that a road safety campaign be organised once a year in educational institutions; that teachers be trained through government initiative and that road safety questions be included in classes and examinations; that awareness be created through life-oriented campaigns in the media and on social media; that unsafe vehicles be taken off the roads; and that safety measures be ensured on the roads around educational institutions.
Strict enforcement of the law must be ensured so that under-age people cannot ride motorbikes under any circumstances, and initiatives are needed to build awareness within families.
The Road Safety Foundation said students across the country, including in Dhaka, built a movement demanding safe roads after two students of Shaheed Ramiz Uddin College were killed by a reckless Jabale Noor bus on the airport road on 29 July 2018. Eight years on, discipline has not been established in the road transport sector and road crashes have not been brought under control. No long-term, sustainable plan for establishing discipline in road transport is being implemented. The steps that are being taken are largely unscientific and uncoordinated.
The organisation added that unobstructed enforcement of the road transport law must be ensured. Interest groups in the road transport sector maintain disorder on the roads to serve their own corruption and extortion. Committees are formed and recommendations drawn up from time to time to establish discipline in public transport, but none of the recommendations sees the light of day. Efforts to establish discipline in the road transport sector are essentially going round in circles between forming committees and drafting recommendations, while in reality there is no improvement in the situation.
বাংলায় মূল প্রতিবেদন পড়ুন · Read the original Bengali report