Valued cars, valueless lives

But what is so special about deaths in road accidents in India? Doesn8217;t the same thing happen in all other countries? Or, you might even ask, isn8217;t this the price we pay for development, industrialisation and quote higher road casualty figures from the richer countries. But that, really, is not the point. Given the relatively small number of vehicles in our country, and our slow speeds, we should be losing a lot fewer lives on our so-called highways. In a way the jholawalas are right. The casualty graph on our roads has kept pace with the increase in the number of motor vehicles and in spite of the improvement in their quality and safety standards. This, precisely, is the problem and hence the conspiracy theory.

In our system nobody ever feels accountable for a problem as mundane as road safety. Overspeeding, drunken driving, faulty loading are as much a part of our highway culture as the dhabas. In so many years of driving on the highways, I don8217;t remember ever seeing someone hauled in for any of these crimes8217; that cause a bulk of the accidents and that keep the police busy in the more developed countries.

The local district administrations, the state governments and certainly the Centre see no clear role for themselves in reducing fatalities on our roads. That is why no heads roll as literally hundreds of overloaded trucks overturn, destroying goods, often killing drivers on our highways. Anyone who has driven on the more prominent death-traps, the Grand Trunk Road, the Bombay-Pune and Ahmedabad-Vadodara stretches of our so-called highways has seen so many of these that, given half a chance, he would now take a train instead.

Most of those who get killed on our highways and at busy intersections of our crowded cities are poor pedestrians. In a country with no concept of social security, their deaths are documented only to become part of a yellowing file in an obscure government office. Given the record of arrests and convictions in such cases, killing on the road is the safest crime the easiest to get away with. The BMW incident is just a case in point.

Because greater prosperity also means more respect for human life, in most of the modernising countries road safety consciousness has kept pace with the increasing number and speed of vehicles. In most modern societies, for example, it is a crime to travel on the road without seat belts, the one simple device that cuts fatalities by more than 70 per cent.

In India, no state government, no municipality, has even thought of enforcing that very sensible law. The governments are still struggling to implement the helmet law for the drivers of two-wheelers which, as usual, has become one more avenue for the traffic policemen to make money. But there isn8217;t even an awareness campaign an-ywhere for seat belts.

The point is not that any of these would have saved the very promising life of Rajesh Pilot. It is just that, in his death, he has underlined for us the one great threat to our lives and properties that we have been so oblivious of. There has to be a sociological explanation to how insensitive we, as a society, are to completely avoidable loss of life on our roads.

No one is really called to account even in Delhi when children fall off school buses and die. No one asks his municipality or the district administration or the state government what kind of traffic safety laws, casualty evacuation facilities and trauma services they have. And when an ambulance does reach in time to pick up a casualty, how reluctant are we to give it the right of way.

Is it because, in our own warped worldview, the victim of the accident is usually some poor sod, the anonymous body with its face covered that you callously drive by every now and then? Or some drunken, uncivil truck driver from deep Punjab who, apparently, should have been more responsible in the first place? Are we so insensitive because we think that the usual accident victim is not from among People Like Us? In an odd sort of a way it is very similar to our attitude towards rail accidents. The National Crime Bureau tells us nearly 17-18,000 people die on our rail tracks every year. But we only think of the few hundred felled down in train collisions and derailments. All the rest, the villagers who strayed on the track, travellers in a tractor-trolley that got rammed at an unmanned crossing, and so on, are people from another India and do not bother our conscience.

Pilot8217;s death is a reminder that this is no longer true. Most of us now have a close relative, friend or acquaintance who died, or was maimed in a road accident. And when you analyse each one of these tragedies, you would find that in most cases the accident or the death was quite avoidable if we had better roads, better compliance with traffic rules, the use of seat belts, helmets, quicker casualty evacuation, better tr-auma care and so on.

For each one of these services, a specific department of the government is already at least theoretically responsible. It is time that we, as citizens, began to seek more accountability from these. So, sue the courts are now more sensitive to these cases than you think when you think someone8217;s negligence made you lose a family member on the road. Demand better road safety from your elected bodies and representatives. If we learn the art and the consciousness to use our system to punish those guilty of causing death by negligence, we will hopefully lose fewer friends and family members to our killer roads in years to come as our cars get faster, snazzier and more numerous.