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Journalism of Courage
The tragic death of Cyrus Mistry came days after the National Crime Records Bureau’s Accidental Deaths & Suicides in India (ADSI) report showed that 1.55 lakh individuals died in accidents on India’s roads in 2021, up from the 1.33 lakh deaths in the pandemic lockdown year of 2020.
Mistry and Jehangir Pandole, the other person who died in Sunday’s crash on National Highway 48, were both in the back seat of a Mercedes Benz GLC SUV. It is not yet known whether they were wearing seat belts. However, both the driver and the individual in the front passenger seat survived.
The top-end model of the GLC comes equipped with seven airbags: driver, passenger, driver knee, driver side, front passenger side, and two curtain airbags.
Seat belts are compulsory in both the front and back seats. Section 194 (B)(1) of The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 says, “Whoever drives a motor vehicle without wearing a safety belt or carries passengers not wearing seat belts shall be punishable with a fine of one thousand rupees”.
A video issued in the public interest by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways says wearing a seat belt reduces the impact of an accident by 80 per cent.
In February, the government made it mandatory for automakers to provide three-point seat belts for all front-facing passengers in a car, including the middle seat in the rear row of a car.
According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration (NHTSA) of the US Department of Transportation, of the 23,824 passenger vehicle occupants killed in 2020, 51% were not wearing seat belts — a 4% increase from 2019. A statistical brief prepared by the NHTSA in 2019 estimated that seat belts saved 14,955 lives in 2017 alone, and could have saved an additional 2,549 people that year if they had been wearing seat belts.
As of 2021, the overall seat belt use rate in the US was 90.4 per cent, according to the NHTSA.
Attitudes to seat belts
The Ministry of Road Transport video mentioned above was published on YouTube in April 2017, and had received just 117 views as of Monday.
Compliance of seat belts in the rear seat is poor in India. For most people, wearing seat belts is mandatory only for the front seat. It is not uncommon to find people preferring to sit in the back just to avoid the “inconvenience” of wearing a seat belt.
There is no clear-cut reason for non-compliance. Three broad arguments are usually presented.
Indians don’t care about their safety: It has been argued that for most Indians, the safety of a car or a particular ride is secondary to the cost (or mileage) and creature comforts. Some taxi drivers have the seat belt buckled but aren’t strapped in themselves, and slide in only when there are traffic police around. Pillion riders on two-wheelers often don’t wear helmets or wear hard hats or cricket helmets that offer very little protection in a crash.
The problem is if one believes that Indians are irrational about safety, it is difficult to visualise a sustainable solution, even though policy interventions, technological upgrades, and awareness campaigns can help. Also, data from elsewhere show that developed countries too went through this phase. Until the 1960s, for example, American automakers resisted the idea of increasing safety, even as European cars were known for their safety credentials.
Indians don’t want to spend more on safer cars: The Indian Express reported recently that the Centre’s plan to mandate six airbags in all cars from October 1 is likely to be deferred amid internal discussions on its fallout in the small car market, and a pushback from the industry. Leading the industry opposition is Maruti Suzuki India, which makes almost every second car that is sold in India. According to Maruti, additional airbags will push up prices of entry-level cars and likely result in further weakening demand. Hyundai Motor has pulled the plug on the Santro, apparently because reconfiguring the car for six airbags would make it unviable.
Long-term trends in high-income countries show road traffic deaths were rising before the 1960s, but began to decline shortly afterward, and have continued to decline ever since — even though vehicle ownership increased steadily. On the other hand, traffic injuries in most low- and middle-income countries are either rising or are stable at a high level.
Research shows that traffic death rates are a function of income growth: when countries are poor they experience rising injuries with increasing income; when countries are rich they experience declines in traffic injury with increasing income.
India suffers from poor enforcement of laws: Researchers such as Kavi Bhalla of the University of Chicago have found that the reversal in trend in road deaths in western countries during the 1960s was not because they reached a certain income threshold, but because of significant regulatory and institutional changes that brought about a paradigm shift in thinking about road safety.
“In the US…this period was one in which the problem (and hence the potential solutions) shifted from being driver-oriented to a more balanced approach, which later came to be known as the ‘Safe System’ approach. It included interventions that focused on vehicles, road infrastructure, and post-crash care, in a broad view of the environment in which crashes happen. The movement was led by…engineers, physicians, lawyers, and politicians,” Bhalla wrote in a co-authored paper.
This led to the establishment of the National Highway Safety Bureau (later NHTSA). NHTSA and the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) had mandates to regulate safety standards for vehicles and highways, and played an important role in pushing the development and enforcement of interventions such as airbags, seat belts, etc.
The upshot
Blaming irrationality for road fatalities is a dead end from a policy perspective. While it is true that there is a broad correlation between income levels and road safety, the more salient and actionable insight is that low- and middle-income countries such as India do not have to wait until their per capita income level improves drastically before achieving improvements in road safety.
The solution lies in creating an institutional framework with a nationwide mandate and the financial muscle to bring about systemic changes, rather than periodic drives carried out by police against people who drive without seat belts or crash helmets.
