In a spine-chilling incident, a school girl was fatally run over by a car driven by a young medical college student in Tirunelveli on Monday evening. The youth, it is said, was trying to frighten the girl by accelerating the brand new car towards her and lost control of the wheel, leading to the tragedy. Just a few days ago, another car driven by an engineering student went out of control on a road in Chennai, causing a series of accidents and injuring a quite few people.
Almost every day we read about a road accident in the newspapers and quite often it transpires that youngsters were driving or riding the vehicles that caused the accident.
A Global Status Report on Road Safety released by the World Health Organisation a couple of years ago said that road accidents claim at least 13 lives every hour and by the year 2030 it will be the fifth biggest killer in the world. The report also said that the accident rate in India was rather high.
Should we let roads turn into a major killer? Unlike pestilence and epidemics, over which we have no control, road accidents can be controlled and thereby lives saved.
So how do we go about it? To find a solution to any problem, one has to start with figuring out the causes. Road accidents are most often caused by errors on the part of drivers, riders and pedestrians, by bad roads and by the poor maintenance of vehicles. Of drivers’ mistakes two stand out. One is drunk driving and the other is irresponsible driving. In the two accidents mentioned above, the first was due to irresponsible driving and the second was a case of drunk driving.
By creating awareness among road users – motorists, cyclists and pedestrians – we can definitely bring down accidents caused by drunk or reckless drivers. Before embarking on a campaign, you should remember that in India, 18 years is the minimum age for obtaining a driving licence. To put it otherwise, you may have to sensitise some of your friends and schoolmates to the fact that it is illegal to operate an automobile without a driving licence. There is nothing wrong with learning how to ride a motorbike or drive a car when you are young but to drive on the roads you should have a valid licence.
Then you can tell your senior friends, cousins and relatives that alcoholic drinks don’t blend with driving. If you find anybody you know driving after consuming alcohol, you could warn them. It is not only against the law, it is also fraught with the risk of causing accidents. Always ensure that a sober person drives the car you travel in or the motorbike you ride pillion on. That also means that when you drive, you should eschew alcohol.
Coming to irresponsible driving, you have to fight it at all levels. Even if your school bus driver violates traffic signals, you should admonish him gently. Besides jumping red lights, drivers violate a plethora of traffic rules by not keeping to the right track, stopping after the stop line and hampering the free movement of vehicles, entering roads that are marked ‘one way’ and so on. So as responsible citizens of the country you should learn the traffic rules yourself and chide anyone who breaks them.
But the most important target should be those spoilt brats who try to show off through rash and dangerous driving. Just let those attention seekers know that their antics are not hip and that daredevilry belongs to the cave ages.