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Road accidents are news items which we read about with horror! A day later, they become statistics. Except when one of the victims is someone close to you.

There was a terrible accident in Delhi a couple of weeks ago. A Skoda being driven at night at some speed, went out of control and smashed into a tree. The two young men in front were wearing seat belts, and in spite of the severity of the crash, were saved. The young couple in the back were not wearing theirs. They were thrown out and died instantly. The girl was nineteen. My nephew, sitting next to her, was 23.

The media was full of moralising stories about spoilt and rich brats partying hard and driving recklessly when drunk.

As it happens though, the front seat passenger who survived, and the girl and my nephew who didn’t, come from modest middle class families with parents who are academics or work with NGOs. The boys only had a beer or two while the girl was a teetotaller.They weren’t spoilt, which is why they didn’t have their own cars. Fate, if you believe in it, or terrible bad luck if you don’t, made them accept a lift from a young man who turned out to be dangerously drunk. As he pushed the car to high speed, (180 kmph according to the police, 140 kmph according to the boy who survived), the girl began to cry.“Slow down, slow down,” she pleaded.“If you drive like this, you will kill us.”He did.

It’s too late, of course, for two sets of grieving parents, but for the rest of us, what lessons can we learn from this cautionary tale? That to tell your children and yourselves, to watch who they drive with?That, even in the back of the car, you should always wear your seat belt?

These, unfortunately, are precautions, not guarantees. I remember a friend’s mother standing on the road divider waiting to go across, when a bus veered into her and killed her instantly. More recently, there have been the terrible accidents in Mumbai, taking young lives. The 14-month-old girl killed at her own doorstep as a learner driver lost control and rammed into her; the young mother run over by a teenage driver as she took her two children to school…

Now these too have become part of our bloody statistics, statistics which get worse day by day, with nothing seemingly being able to stop their devastatingly upward spiral.

That’s why, when the traffic police began to crack down on drunken driving, we silently applauded. Yet with our national ingenuity for circumventing the law, it now seems that a loss of a licence is no big deal; you can now get a duplicate for as little as Rs500, no questions asked. So when the traffic police proudly proclaim that in the first two months of this year they suspended 1,257 licences, what does it really mean? Contrast this with England where every time you are caught for a traffic offence you are docked a certain number of points. Cross a particular figure and your licence is suspended. This is possible because there is a national computerised system and traffic police are equipped with scanners to read your licence and check your driving history. Apparently a proposal to get these scanners is pending with the Transport Commissioner.

There is a lot else that is pending. Foremost there is the farce of our driving tests where you get your licence to kill after a cursory quarter kilometre drive down a secluded road.But elsewhere, say in the UK, you would be subjected to such a rigorous test that most of our experienced drivers are known to fail the first time. Not satisfied with that, the authorities there have now introduced a computerised test where a candidate is put through a simulator which mimics road conditions and emergencies, which give an indication of the driver’s reaction times.

What do we need for these changes to happen? More accidents? More people killed? M ore families devastated? Isnt’ that too high a price to pay for administrative sloth and callousness?