Will you click a pic or save a life?

The video of 18-year-old accident victim Anwar Ali lying in blood and crying for help for some 25 minutes before he succumbs to his injuries as bystanders click away is not just spine-chilling but also throws up troubling questions. Why didn't people rush to help him? Why did they continue to take pictures and videos of a boy bleeding to death?

Ironically, the incident, which sent shock waves for this collective inhumanity, happened in Koppal, Karnataka, the first state to draft a Good Samaritan Bill that speeds up the legal and procedural hassles for bystanders who help road-accident victims.

Blame it on technology, says Mumbai-based psychologist Dr Pradnya Ajinkya, who believes that a group of people being inactive in a situation is a disturbing narrative. She calls it bystander inaction — the psychological phenomenon of social proof, is when people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behavior for a given situation. It provides an amateur photographer the ultimate bragging right and can be essentially considered a narcissistic act. "People are not cold or uncaring. They're simply responding to the psychological principle of social proof. Audience inhibition, social influence, and diffusion of responsibility factor the social interference," she says.According to Ajinkya, greater the number of bystanders to an emergency, greater the diffusion of responsibility, and least likely that anyone will intervene to aid the victim. The purpose of bystanders, she explains, seems to be to "leave only footprints, take only selfies".

In 2015, about 1,46,133 people died in road accidents in India, according to Save Life Foundation (SLF), a non-profit that works in the space of road safety and awareness. This is the highest recorded death toll in the history of road accident deaths in India. An estimated 50 per cent of these lives could have been saved if they'd received medical aid within the first hour after the accident.

Six degrees of separation

"It's like there are six degrees of separation between us and our true feelings, the virtual world and reality," says Carol Andrade, a journalist-turned-educationist and a keen observer of social behaviour. She believes we've confused virtual reality with life and have forgotten to draw the line between our public and private selves. "Some feel that nothing is real unless digitally recorded. So people watched this boy die through their mobile phones and felt nothing because of the emotional disconnect that social media has brought into our lives."

SLF's 2013 national study, Impediments to Bystander Care in India, revealed that three out of four people are reluctant to help road accident victims. For most, the reluctance stemmed from a fear of being dragged into protracted police investigations and legal proceedings.

According to Saji Cherian, director of operations, at SLF, the notion that Indians are apathetic by nature is unfounded. There are countless instances where bystanders have intervened and saved lives in incidents related to building collapses, bomb blasts, fires, train accidents and the like.

However, the same bystanders who become rescuers in other situations, are reluctant to come forward to help road-accident victims due to fear of police harassment, time spent at hospitals and the judicial process that they get sucked into for years. "We realised that this issue needed to be addressed through a comprehensive legal framework and started advocating for a Good Samaritan Law (GSL) for the country. In 2012, SLF filed a Public Interest Litigation (PIL) in the Supreme Court seeking protection for good samaritans who come forward to help crash victims. In March 2016, the court ensured protection to good samaritans from any ensuing legal and procedural hassles," adds Cherian.

However, India is a country of 1.3 billion people and the message needs to percolate to every individual for the court's order to bring about change. "This requires state governments to put in concerted effort to sensitise people about their new rights," Cherian asserts.