Many companies had objected to such a ban being implemented saying that it would be costly for them to transport their workers in buses. Labourers till date continue to be ferried from worksites to camps by their companies in the back of open trucks.
“Several people have died or were maimed because of this mode of transportation. It proves that the back of the trucks are not safe for workers who are ferried on a daily basis to and from work,” a human rights activist told the Tribune.
This mode of transportation in last couple of years has claimed the lives of at least seven men. The most recent casualty being that of Raju, a 40-year-old GPZ employee who succumbed to spinal injuries sustained in an accident in August last year in a truck accident in Sitra.
The deaths also included three men who died in a head-on collision between a six-wheeler and a trailer truck on the Alba-Hawar Highway on October 8, 2006. Two Asian workers died on the spot and another succumbed to injuries in hospital.
There were reportedly as many as 33 labourers in the truck at the time and the death toll could have been higher.
In another incident in September the same year, 28 people were injured, six of them seriously, in an early morning collision between two trucks on the Budaiya Highway signal near the Pearl Roundabout.
The activists are optimistic about a Cabinet decision that bans the use of six-wheeled trucks to transport workers from 2009. The directives were issued to ensure the workers’ safety from their workplaces to their homes and vice-versa.
Social workers, trade unions and embassies of different countries have repeatedly called on the authorities to stop the transportation of workers in trucks.
“These are men and not cattle. Treat them with some dignity,” social workers have been saying over and over again as they called for the ban.
