Need tough traffic laws, safer cars, aware public
It is difficult how anything positive can emerge out of a high-profile car accident that has claimed the life of a five-year-old and injured others. However, these losses may not go in vain if the currently negative narrative surrounding the accident can be changed to focus on the larger issue of road safety in India. last week's accident, in which actor-politician Hema Malini's car collided with that of the Khandelwal family's, near Dausa on the Agra-Jaipur national highway, has got national coverage because of the involvement of a celebrity but the fact of the matter is that such accidents are a routine affair. Every year, over two lakh people in road accidents across the country, a World Health Organisation report has estimated.
According to the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India, in 2013 alone, the number of road accidents was nearly five lakh. About 16 deaths and 58 road injuries occur per hour in India, the Centre for Science and Environment found in a 2014 assessment on road safety. That CSE study also noted that the share of fatal accidents had gone up from 18 per cent in 2003 to 25 per cent in 2012. Road accidents are usually considered a law and order problem — the common assumption is that they happen because someone didn't follow the rules; either one party was speeding or another took an illegal turn or a third ignored a warning sign — but given the scale of the problem, there is ground to argue that it should be considered a public health issue like polio or tuberculosis. After all, road accidents are now one of the leading causes of deaths in this country.
last year, the Narendra Modi Government had shown some resolve in prioritising this issue. The new administration had unfortunately lost one of its senior Ministers in a car accident in New Delhi, just about a week after being sworn in to office, and it had immediately promised a host of measures to improve road safety across the country. Today, most of those measures are stuck in the pipeline. The Road Safety and Transport Bill, 2014, which was to replace the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, is yet to be taken up by Union Cabinet.
The Bill has also been significantly diluted with different transport lobbies pulling the strings. The situation is no better in the private sector which has been equally reluctant to improve its record. As repeated crash tests conducted by global automobile organisations have shown, the vehicles, especially the cheaper ones, manufactured for India are below international standards (even though they may be in compliance with national guidelines). This is why in last month's Mumbai car accident involving a luxury Audi car and a budget taxi vehicle, it was the driver of the former that survived while two occupants of the latter died. But safety shouldn't be a luxury — and it is only when a conscious public will demand as much, will the state and the industry fall in line.