Accidents and Compensation Policy

In Nepal, there were many cases where we find in simple accidents vehicle drivers deliberately kill the passers by or the other vehicle drivers. This is not because the driver is a killer or has fantasy to kill but it is because of the compensation policy. The compensation policy of Nepal was designed in such a way that driver are urged to kill the victims. If a person dies in a vehicle accident then the other party has to pay only NRs.17,000 and some legal charges but if the person live is saved in the accident then the other party has to bear his medical charges of the other person . So this policy compelled the one party of the accident to kill the other party. There were many cases when vehicles were turned and hit the victim leaving him/her to die. Due to protests from the last few months these days this policy is not effective. Here I am not going to mention about the hit and run cases in accidents and not even about the compensation policy of Nepal.

Poverty in Nepal is a well known fact. People in Nepal do not have a decent earning and are involved in laborious works. You must be wondering why I jumped from accidents and compensation policy to poverty. Today I was talking to one of my instructor; he shared a very distressing fact. I will come to this fact a bit later. I was talking about poverty previously; there is a saying “Rich gets richer and poor gets children.” This statement is too ironic and true in many cases. Poor people while giving birth to children only think about the hands that work not about the mouth that asks for the food. The number of children might also be due to lack of access to contraceptives or due to lack of awareness. But today I heard that people mainly of Terai belt; marginalized and ultra poor people, they tend to bear children to get compensation. You might be wondering when these days government is discouraging for bearing many children; I am talking about the compensation for child bearing. But this is not the case, in the highway areas, parents themselves leave their child and domestic animals to be hit by the high speed vehicles so that they can claim for the compensation for the death of their child.

These days women population is highly missing from the population data in India and China. The sex selective abortion is high in rate, though the government highly restricts such abortions. There are numerous Indian citizens who come to Nepal for abortion. I was glad of thought that Nepal has yet not been influenced by these two neighboring countries. But today when I found that in this context my country is far too ahead of the world’s progressing countries, I feel dejected and shameless of not being able to help. Human by nature is selfish and tends to do anything for one’s prosperity but it is the limit to be selfish. The poverty of our country has made people so desperate that to have a decent meal they are not even hesitant to kill their own child.