Kushan Mitra
A tragically common headline in India usually goes: ‘Man killed by vehicle in Minister’s convoy’, and other variations of it where people die because of a roadblock due to a convoy. Even more tragic is that, unless these incidents involve a high-profile politician, they get buried in the inside pages of a newspaper, much like the tragically frequent ‘Bus slides down a hill’ headline, where the death of 30 passengers warrants a terse single column and nary a mention on the television. And what about the two to three people who get killed on Mumbai’s suburban network daily? Nothing.
A bus crash will be on the top of the news in many parts of the world, but it gets a passing mention here. Personally, I feel there are a number of reasons for this. The first is the dichotomy between the value of lives of India’s one per cent and the rest.
The other is that such accidents are a fact of life, such that even if someone rich or important dies in an accident and makes it to the evening news, it is forgotten the day after. While talking heads scream and shout on television channels about fictional issues such as intolerance, India is tolerating hundreds of its sons and daughters dying everyday due to incidents that can be clearly prevented if people themselves value their own lives.
India’s jugaad culture, celebrated in some books and even in advertisements, is often nothing more than taking a short-cut. While some innovations credited tojugaad are indeed innovative, many are short-cuts which actively endanger lives.
Take the new fad by vegetable vendors to re-purpose old scooters and motorise their carts. Innovative yes, but you have polluting old engines that should really be recycled and unregistered motor vehicles. Instead of prosecuting these innovations, some celebrate them.
And the value of life is often judged against cost. Take, for example, the way many parents send their wards to schools across the country. Twelve children plus a driver in an overcrowded van. Forget the sheer physical risks of a thin metal sheet on a van that should really be taken out of production, and likely will be once new safety norms are put in place, how can any certification agency allow that many people inside a vehicle?
I do not wish to argue that parents do not care of their children or are so tight for money that they actively choose to put their children at risk every day of the week, but it is hard not to. But the argument for this out-and-out safety hazard is that the Government allows it. How the traffic police of various cities and associated transport departments allows India’s children to be put at risk daily, is shameful.
It is because of this lackadaisical attitude towards safety that we take the loss of life through accidents far too casually. Because the fault can always be pinned on someone else – whether it is the Government or in some cases a celebrity. The fact is that our attitude towards both our personal safety and the safety of others is evident in our selfish attitude.
There’s the inability to keep a queue, for example, unless strictly enforced. And also the fact that driving on the wrong side of the road and even taking a U-turn, the wrong way, is deemed perfectly acceptable by the public at large, as is the ‘right’ of all sorts of vehicular traffic to use the roads.
That horrible stereotype of India where elephants walk the roads? Yes, it is true. I saw one walking on the Tilak Marg past the Supreme Court the other day. Cycle-rickshaws on major arterial roads? Yes. In fact, the miracle possibly is that only 50 odd people die on Indian roads. That is possibly because traffic inside every Indian city has ground to a virtual halt.
Yes, we are right to demand azadi from all sorts of social ills and we have the right to give grandiose speeches, but Indians long ago seem to have declared azadi from traffic rules. And while personal freedoms are important, let us us all get one thing clear, there are no ‘personal’ freedom on the roads on India.
No one has the ‘right’ to drive on the roads, which is public property, just a license to do so by the Government. And while corruption at some transport departments across the country has been tackled, getting a license is still abysmally easy.
And god forbid if something were to happen to you on the road. Let alone if it was a ministerial convoy, the selfish attitude of most is evident in the way they refuse to help their fellow man or woman injured on the streets. Of course, not helping does not mean not taking selfies.
It is time to change this mindset. This has to come from the very top. Ministers and bureaucrats themselves should be encouraged to ensure those injured due to their convoys receive medical attention. But they should also start to inculcate a culture of road safety in their ministries and States.
