The accident involving a Ferrari in Kolkata proves road safety comes last on India's priority list
The driver of a Ferrari crashed into a bridge divider and lost his life with his co-passenger battling for her life in a Kolkata hospital. Prima facie it appears that while the Italian supercar was travelling fast, there are a multitude of reasons for this accident. The first of course, is one of speed. With the exception of a couple of new Expressways, most Indian highways are incapable of even handling their posted 90 kilometres per hour speed limits safely. One reason they are incapable of handling such speeds is clea in this accident, non-standard road dividers.
Proper, well-installed guardrails should have been able to hold the vehicle and not penetrated through. But another major reason for the fatality that followed has nothing to do with road design, but a lack of proper highway emergency services across the country.
While some new Expressways have limited emergency services, on most Indian roads fatalities are guaranteed in high-speed accidents even though cars have become safer because of a lack of emergency medical facilities. There are few ambulances that are equipped with life-saving equipment and many highway patrols even lack basic cutters which can be used to cut open crushed vehicles.
In fact, many city police and fire service forces lack this basic piece of equipment. On highways that are often long distances away from cities, there need to be medical evacuation helicopters, what is the point of paying thousands of crores in toll fees every year if not a single such helicopter is in service in a country the size of IndiaIJ There is little point building thousands of kilometres of fancy new expressways every year if emergency medical facilities are not developed and helicopters to evacuate the injured are not also bought side-by-sideIJ Is this an admission that life is cheap in IndiaIJ
At the same time, some claim the accident was caused by an errant truck driver. While not wanting to pin the blame on the trucker, as Indian roads become faster it is vital that drivers across the country are given the proper training to deal with the faster roads that are being built across the country. This paper has argued in the past that a ground-up overhaul of the driving license system is required across India, something to shake up the system as ‘notebandi' did to unaccounted wealth.
Over 150,000 people died on Indian roads last year, numbers that are shocking and many of those people could have been saved if facilities were improved and drivers actually punished for poor driving. This should not come to the fore after a case involving a Ferrari, but after every single incident. Enough is enough.