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Indian author’s highway death casts light on driver fatigue, again
The deaths of one of India’s most revered Hindi language writers, Ganga Prasad Vimal, and two of his family members on the Southern Expressway in Kurundugahahetakma this week have drawn attention to driver fatigue as a major cause of road accidents in Sri Lanka. 
The 80-year-old was travelling from Galle with his family in a van which crashed into a container truck. He and two of his family members, a 44-year-old woman and her 18-year-old son, died instantly, while the 67-year-old driver passed away later in hospital. A 49-year-old man and a 10-year-old girl were admitted to hospital with injuries.
And now, the factors behind his and many other accidents are again raising serious questions about why Sri Lanka has just not been able to stem the tide of road traffic accidents.
“Usually, when an accident occurs, an audit, or investigation is carried out, a report submitted and released for public access to make people aware of how to prevent similar accidents in future,” said Amal Kumarage, senior professor of the Department of Transport and Logistics at the University of Moratuwa.“This unfor-tunately doesn’t happen in Sri Lanka and it is the main reason for the escalating number of similar accidents.”
Prof Kumarage condemned the authorities for not educating the public more on the prevention of road accidents.
Police said the driver of Mr Vimal’s van had fallen asleep.
Investigations showed he had not applied brakes at the time of the crash.
Dangerous driving, speeding, and drunk driving are other contributing factors to road accidents in the recent past. But one of the main causes of collisions on the southern highway is lack of awareness among drivers about how to use it, said Superintendent of Police Indika Hapugoda, director of Traffic Administration and Road Safety.
“People stop and get off on highways, some drive really fast and many fall asleep due to fatigue,” he said. Some drivers said that driving fast on the straight road in auto gear vehicles also bred monotony, which caused them to nod off.
Police statistics showed that 2,075 died in 22,778 road accidents between January 1 and September 30 this year. During the same period last year, 2,429 lives were lost in 27,559 crashes.
Committees have been set up on provincial and divisional levels to create awareness of road safety, said Mahinda Jayasinghe, Secretary of the National Council for Road Safety. The focus is on educating children and instructions have been given to schools.
Born in 1939 in Uttarkashi, a Himalayan town in Uttarakhand, the author Mr Vimal held key responsibilities in Jawaharlal Nehru University, Delhi University and Kendriya Hindi Sansthan, Agra, the Press Trust of India, reported.
He wrote more than one dozen poetry collections, short story collections and novels. His last novel, Manushkhor, was published in 2013. He received several Hindi literary awards.