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| Edited By: Piyush Tewari |Source: DNA |Updated: Dec 25, 2013, 10:05 AM IST
About a million people have died in road accidents in India in the past decade. Another 5.3 million have been seriously injured or permanently disabled because of road accidents. That makes more than six million people, including families who’ve lost breadwinners and as a result been pushed into poverty, directly affected by them. The Planning Commission estimates that our country loses Rs1.5 lakh crore every year as a result of road accidents. This is a massive socio-economic toll.
While India needs safer roads, ensuring road safety is complex. If one were to only examine how someone gets on the road to be able to drive, it is clear that the local agencies only teach one how to operate a vehicle. Nobody teaches one how to drive safely. Besides, driver’s licenses can be home delivered for a price. So the two things that control the quality of drivers coming on the road — driver’s licensing system and the driver’s education system — are either completely fractured or missing.
On the road, enforcement controls a driver’s behaviour. Unfortunately, in India, enforcement is human-driven, low on capacity and entirely corruptible. It doesn’t involve technology at all. The third thing that determines safety is engineering and design of the road and of vehicles. We’ve created a situation on our roads whereby cyclists and buses share the extreme left lane. This leads to a conflict between the most vulnerable and the heaviest road user and leads to deaths.
While our vehicles, although they look the same as those marketed internationally, internally, they lack the same safety features that are marketed abroad. Auto companies do not follow the same vehicle safety standards in India that they do globally and we often have to pay a higher price for a safer vehicle. The other big issue is that when an accident takes place, 50 per cent people die due to treatable injuries as even basic care doesn’t reach them in time.
It is obvious then that there are multiple stakeholders in ensuring safer roads: the transport department deals with driver’s license and education, the police or home ministry looks after enforcement, the ministry of heavy industries deals with vehicle engineering, urban development, PWD or NHAI look into road engineering and design while trauma care is dealt with by the health ministry. All these departments work in silos. There is no agency or organisation that brings these different people under a single umbrella or provides leadership to these issues. So it is important that we put in place a lead agency to address these issues from an accident prevention standpoint.
The other critical aspect is to have a comprehensive national road safety law. Right now, our only piece of legislation ignores the most vulnerable users on the road. This is apparent in the way it is named — the Motor Vehicles Act only relates to the movement of motorised vehicles. It has no statutes to protect cyclists, pedestrians and other non-motorised road users. Our country might be the only one in the world that has no statutes to safeguard children, whom we carry like sandbags and have them sitting in our laps while driving. Some of the other provisions of the Act, such as the one allowing trucks to carry protruding rods, are extremely dangerous and need to be struck down. A study in 10 states in India found that protruding rods caused 4,000 deaths over two years. So, the law is deficient in the very way it is structured. India needs an overreaching law that brings everybody who is using the road under its ambit and provides them protection or regulates them.
The author is the co-founder of Save Life Foundation, an advocacy group that works to improve road safety
