CHENNAI: India, if the Global Status Report on Road Safety 2015, guidelines are taken into account, does not meet the WHO standards on child safety, as Indian law does not restrict children below 10 sitting in the front seat.
A WHO study says 52 countries have a law that restrains children under the age of 10 from sitting in the front seat of cars.
SaveLIFE Foundation, an independent, non-profit, non-governmental organization focused on improving road safety and emergency medical care across India says that while WHO report stresses the redesigning of roads to cater to the needs of all road users, the current Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, does not identify road engineering and design as one of the causes of road accidents and fails to penalise faulty road engineering by stating that the unscientific nature of investigations of accidents in India denies the possibility of holding road contractors liable for accidents.
Forty-nine countries analyse data from frontal-impact assessments and 47 countries analyse data from side-impact assessments, the WHO report said. SaveLIFE Foundation points out that despite the TN population of 68 million constituting only 5.66 percent of India’s population, it accounts for 10.73 percent of all deaths resulting from road accidents in the country.