Minor drivers, major damage

Incidents in the past few days, one in Delhi and another in Mumbai, have cost two lives thanks to rash and negligent driving by minors. The incident in Delhi is even more shocking as it appears that the driver of the vehicle in question was posting content onto social media of his rash driving that killed Sahil Dhaneshra.

All over social media platforms, especially Meta’s Instagram, short-form videos of youth indulging in rash driving are rampant. Tragically, not only have shooting these videos cost the lives of other road users, in multiple cases across India those shooting the videos inside the cars have paid with their own lives.

Underage and drunken driving are bad enough; however, those are unlikely to go away anytime soon. However, rash driving for the sake of social media is a problem that can be fixed very quickly.

Just as the Government has issued instructions to social media platforms to remove fake content generated by Artificial Intelligence, they can issue directions to remove content that displays bad driving and stunt biking.

In fact, social media platforms can easily use Artificial Intelligence to remove such content quickly.

The unwillingness of social media platforms to address this issue has led to riskier and riskier content being produced on Indian roads, often by people who should know better, such as bureaucrats, journalists, and politicians. Several automotive content producers regularly showcase content where 0-100 speed tests are conducted on public city roads.

Bureaucrats and politicians, as well as their children, flaunt their connections and are a menace on the roads.This leads to cases where innocent victims like Sahil Dhaneshra, as well as Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta, who were mowed down in Pune before him, will never get justice.

If you are old enough to take the wheel of a vehicle and that vehicle is involved in an accident, you should be old enough to suffer the consequences of that accident. It could well be that the accident is not the fault of the driver of the vehicle, but this has to be decided through an investigation; one should not be allowed to get away on the basis of being a ‘minor’.

Additionally, if social media platforms are reluctant to remove content that showcases rash and dangerous driving that endangers the poster and other road users as well, the Government has to intervene. Some police forces have cracked down on so-called influencers by seizing the vehicles involved in such videos, but that is just a drop in the ocean. There needs to be an urgent strategy to deal with this.