The unabating scourge of road accidents
Just two days after the release of a World Bank report on road accidents in India came news of more than 50 people being killed after a bus plunged into a canal in Madhya Pradesh. Media reports said the passenger bus was not only overcrowded—something not uncommon in India—but also speeding. The accident only underlined what Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said while releasing the World Bank report.
Calling this an eye-opener, he termed road accidents worse than Covid-19. The statistics are also damning. India ranks third in the number of road accidents, only behind the US and Japan. But what is worse is that it has the highest number of deaths owing to such accidents. This only goes to show two things: that road safety is hardly a priority in India and that rash and negligent driving is mostly the rule rather than the exception. Of the 1.5 lakh road accident deaths in 2019, 30% were owing to not wearing helmets and 16% due to not putting on seat belts. If the public took road safety seriously, this would not have been India’s track record. The government may bring in laws and try to enforce the rules as strictly as possible but unless commuters themselves follow road safety norms diligently, it will only get worse, with an increasing number of people having access to their own vehicles while road density remains more or less static. But the government also needs to do more. To begin with, enforcement of traffic rules has to be far more stringent.
As of now, it is absolutely lax and steeped in petty bribery. Take wearing helmets for instance. When even in metros such as Chennai, Mumbai, Kolkata and Bengaluru there is hardly any enforcement of the rule, it can only be worse in Tier 2 and Tier 3 towns and villages. The police across the country is severely short-staffed, making enforcement difficult. At least two rules were broken in the Madhya Pradesh accident: speed and seating capacity. In more advanced nations, both these violations would most likely not have been possible. So let’s hope Gadkari can deliver on his promise of reducing fatalities by 50% in the next four years.