Seven years ago, the World Bank paid for a road in Bangladesh to be upgraded, but without demanding basic safety features. Now people are dying by the score. Annie Kelly reports from a killer highway
We saw the bus before we saw the rickshaw. Abandoned on the side of the road, its engine was still running. A dent on the paint-scratched bumper was the only evidence of the head-on collision that had happened just 15 minutes earlier.
We had left the gridlocked city streets of Dhaka that morning, inching our way through the blaring horns out to the start of the highway. Ten minutes down the road, as the city's urban sprawl was giving way to green and the speedometer on our white minivan was inching upwards, we had come across the crash.
On the other side of the highway a group of rickshaw drivers gathered around the mangled remains of a motorised three-wheeler, gesturing angrily at the blood in the wreckage, the shoe lying discarded in the middle of the road.
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