{"id":104908,"date":"2020-07-26T17:06:38","date_gmt":"2020-07-27T00:06:38","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/?p=104908"},"modified":"2020-07-26T17:06:38","modified_gmt":"2020-07-27T00:06:38","slug":"deaths-due-to-competing-private-buses-in-sri-lanka","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/2020\/07\/26\/deaths-due-to-competing-private-buses-in-sri-lanka\/","title":{"rendered":"Deaths due to competing private buses in Sri Lanka"},"content":{"rendered":"<h2><span style=\"color: #0000ff;\"><em>Nimal Rajakaruna, Melbourne, Australia<\/em><\/span><\/h2>\n\n\n<p>Most of us have seen news of another fatal\naccident in which a Sri Lankan army soldier has died on the Nugegoda fly-over\nrecently when the army vehicle he was driving was hit by one private bus which\ntried to take over another.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>I strongly believe that the issue is with\nthe way that bus service was privatised by the late\nJRJ government which came to power in 1977. All private buses need to\ncompete with buses of other private owners as well as those of government\n(SLTB) in order to secure an income which would be sufficient to cover all\ntheir costs including finance. In a civilised country, transport, health and\neducation sectors need to mainly belong to the government and if privatised,\nthey should be under strict control of the government and should not be allowed\nto operate for the sole ambition of making profits. In developed countries like\nAustralia, though transport is privatised, all income generated from ticket\nsales go to a central fund and respective companies providing the services are\npaid their shares while the government monitors that the buses, trains and\ntrams provide satisfactory services. <\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Since privatising the bus service after\n1977, thousands of innocent lives have been lost due to incidents like the\nrecent fatal accident but none of the successive government have taken any\naction to prevent them. There is no doubt that more will die in future unless\nnecessary remedial action is taken without delay. Appreciate if the new\npresident Hon Gotabhaya Rajapakse\u2019s attention is drawn towards a radical change\nin the bus service system in Sri Lanka to eradicate this menace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>Nimal\nRajakaruna<br>\nMelbourne<br>\nAustralia<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nimal Rajakaruna, Melbourne, Australia Most of us have seen news of another fatal accident in which a Sri Lankan army soldier has died on the Nugegoda fly-over recently when the army vehicle he was driving was hit by one private bus which tried to take over another. I strongly believe that the issue is with [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":true,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[5],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-104908","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-security"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104908","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=104908"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/104908\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=104908"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=104908"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.lankaweb.com\/news\/items\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=104908"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}