It was early morning. The driver of a car stopped to change a punctured tyre. Another driver of a passing car halted to help. Minutes later, a private luxury bus rammed both the cars, broke the barriers and plunged into a 20-foot ditch off the road. The death toll: 17. There was machine failure, darkness, human error, rash and reckless driving emboldened by lack of effective policing of speed maniacs.
Everything that could possibly go wrong went wrong. And that sort of sums up the state of India’s roads where safe journeys are governed by providence and the law of averages. There is an accident every minute of the day—there were 5,01,423 accidents in 2015. Every hour, 17 persons are killed and over 50 are injured—in 2015, 1,46,133 persons were killed and 5,00,279 injured. Over half of those killed—or over 78,900—were young lives aged between 15 and 34 years, young dreams and the demographic dividend crushed under cruel wheels.
The tragedy is about lives lost, about families disrupted, about careers interrupted and about aspirations incapacitated. What must anger Indians is that the script has not changed for the past 15 years. Consider the data to appreciate the magnitude of the crisis. Between 2000 and 2015, governments have registered 1,649,770 accidents and 1,039,372 fatalities. And over 50 lakh persons were injured, many handicapped and traumatised for life.
More people have been killed in accidents than in war, terror attacks or Maoist violence. Arguably, more lives have been claimed by India’s roads than by global attacks of terror in the past decade. Last week, the Government of India released the Road Accidents 2015 Report, which informed Indians that between 2005 and 2015, the total number of accidents have increased by 14.2 per cent, killings by 53.9 per cent and injuries by 7.5 per cent.
The lexicon defines an accident as an event that occurs by chance. India, with its devotion to the kinetics of karma, has lived by that description. Experts have listed a number of issues as causes. Essentially, a multiple-failures landscape where anything that can go wrong will go wrong. Chance characterises the difference between an accident and a safe journey.
The approach of successive governments has been to dive into alibi alley. In August 2000, the Government of India was asked what is causing the rise in accidents. The reply: “Lack of traffic discipline on the part of drivers and road users, phenomenal increase in the number of motor vehicles with no corresponding increase in road capacity, mixed traffic conditions, over-speeding, overloading, drunken driving, mechanical defect in vehicles, etc.” The answer in 2014: “Road accidents are caused due to the complex interaction of a number of factors. These include driver’s fault, mechanical defects in the vehicles, fault of pedestrians, bad road, bad weather, increase in vehicular population, increase in population, heterogeneous traffic etc. It may not be possible to pinpoint any one reason for road accidents.”
But there are enough indicators where the system is failing and flailing. Over 77.1 per cent of total road accidents during 2015 were caused by drivers’ faults—quite obviously the licensing process is flawed. In a country where most cities can boast of less than 20km/per hour travel, speed is a major killer—64,633 out of 106,021 deaths in 2015 were caused by speeding—a reflection of poor policing and inadequate use of technology. Every second accident or about 49 per cent of the total mishaps of 2015 took place at junctions—without doubt populism and politics have led to flawed design, and poor facilitation has made pedestrians and travellers vulnerable.
There are other indicators that the system must analyse further. There is a higher rate of accidents in the month of May—is that the heat, holiday season, overcrowding or all of the above. There is the timing—bulk of the accidents happen between 3pm and 9pm, raising questions about lighting and traffic management in cities. And there is the irresponsibility of parents—every year, nearly 20,000 accidents are caused by drivers/riders who are minors.
The question is what has been the response of the system to mitigate what is clearly a human tragedy. Typically, it is a saga of systemic sloth. In 2004, the Government of India became a signatory to a WHO promise at the 57th World Health Assembly, where countries promised to “prepare and implement a national strategy” to prevent road accidents.
In 2005, a committee was constituted under S Sundar to recommend a National Road Safety Policy. It drafted the National Road Safety and Traffic Management Bill, 2007. The legislation did not see the light of day all the way till 2009. In May 2010, the UPA II regime rechristened the draft as the National Road Safety and Traffic Management Board Bill, 2010 and introduced it in the Lok Sabha. The Standing Committee led by Sitaram Yechury submitted its report in August 2010. The bill lapsed in 2014.
The Modi Sarkar came to power in May 2014. In June 2014, the BJP lost one of its mass leaders Gopinath Munde in a road accident in Delhi. The tragedy triggered urgency. Ten years after the solemn declaration, a new National Road Transport and Safety Bill, 2014 was drafted. The strategy behind the legislation is about the four Es—Education, Enforcement, Engineering (roads as well as vehicles) and Emergency care. In March 2016, Pon Radhakrishnan informed Parliament that the “National Road Transport and Safety Bill 2015 is still in a consultation stage”. Last heard, an empowered group of state ministers was looking at it. In May, around the second anniversary of the Modi Sarkar, Nitin Gadkari said the non-passage of the bill was his “biggest regret” and accused vested interests of blocking the bill.
Meanwhile between 2004 and 2015, 787,812 persons were killed on India’s roads. To be sure, not all blame can be piled on the government. Legislation is scarcely a one-stop solution—there is also the deficit in civic sense to content with. There is a pathology that defines Indians—when in queues and on the roads. That demands change. After all the law of randomness makes each vulnerable and, therefore, dictates a more responsible approach while at the wheel.
And as India awaits that civic revolution, here is wishing all safe journeys.
Shankkar Aiyar, Author of Accidental India: A History of the Nation’s Passage through Crisis and Change
shankkar.aiyar@gmail.com