On 11th February 2014, Abdul Shah and Shobejan Begum were told that their daughter, Rukhsar, was declared free of polio. While their relief was unparalleled, little did they realize that Rukhsar was also India’s achievement – the final lap in the marathon that was India’s fight against a deadly and crippling disease. In 1985, there were around 200,000 cases of polio reported in India and it was only a sustained, deliberate campaign that succeeded in weeding out each case until we could finally proclaim to be, polio free.

India approached the epidemic of polio with an iron hand. But there is another silent, ugly epidemic rearing its head in the country which is killing and maiming lakhs of people, yet there seems to be no intervention to stop it. Road Traffic Accidents kill close to 1.4 lakh people every year and seriously injure or disable more than 5 lakh. Road Accidents is an epidemic that affects the lives of more than 600,000 people annually, causing death, disability, and loss of livelihood, thereby pushing thousands of families into poverty and posing a massive burden on health care costs in the country. The Planning Commission estimates that the socio-economic cost of accidents is approximately 3% of India’s GDP. Indian roads also claim the lives of 20 children and scores of other vulnerable road users everyday – while most families look on silently, helplessly and desperately for the country to develop a robust system of accident prevention and emergency response. Road traffic injuries place an immense burden on health-care systems, diverting financial and human resources from other priorities, including the treatment of infectious diseases and chronic health problems. The causes for India’s exceptionally high number of crashes include a fractured licensing system, insufficient drivers’ training, flawed road design and engineering, weak enforcement of traffic laws and the lack of rapid trauma care.

Legislatively, Road Safety and Traffic Management in India is weakly governed by the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 and allied Central Motor Vehicles Rules, 1989 as well as the Rules of the Road Regulations 1989. However this combined body of rules and regulations lacks a basic principle – that of comprehensively addressing Road Safety in India. The Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 is a complex set of clauses governing licensing, vehicle standards and certain offences. But as the name itself glaringly points out, it is an Act that deals with motorized transport and omits to protect and regulate pedestrians, cyclists, cycle rickshaw drivers, children and old people, among others. These Vulnerable Road Users, who make up more than 50% of road users in India are unregulated and unprotected, legally and practically. It nowhere addresses the terrifying reality of children who die on the roads – India neither mandates child helmets, restraints, seat belts or even as simple a move as ensuring that children always travel in the back seat of a car. There is no accountability for faulty road design and engineering in the current ambit of the law. Today, almost 77% of accidents are penned down to “driver error”, an ambiguous term which does not take into consideration bad road design and driver unfriendly engineering interventions. This kind of data collection and analysis is also dangerous as it leads to unfruitful solutions which do not reduce deaths on the roads. The most flagrant omission in the law, however, is the lack of an institutional mechanism for Road Safety, which can coordinate and control the activities of the myriad agencies involved with Road Safety regulation and enforcement in India. The concept of a Lead Agency followed across the world has seen to be effective in reducing road fatalities by ensuring proper synchronization between various departments, agencies and NGO’s.

Even those aspects regulated by the law, such as licensing, registration of motor vehicles and penalties for offences on the roads, are antiquated. They were legislated in 1988 and the dusty clauses have remained the same since then, despite gargantuan changes on our roads, road users and vehicles. For example, the fine for over speeding in India is 400 Rupees for the first offence and 1000 Rupees for the second – both paltry sums which are not enforced and are hardly a deterrent to prevent one of the biggest causes for fatal accidents. Licensing, which is at the core of effective Road Safety regulation since it controls the number and quality of drivers on the roads, is a flimsy system run by touts and agents.

There have been attempts to strengthen and update the Act in the past. However long delays and stalling of crucial amendments have hindered this process significantly. In 2001, certain amendments to the Act were initiated and only in May 2012, were they finally passed by the Rajya Sabha. They were not passed by the Lok Sabha and thus failed to come into effect. In the intervening 12 years, from 2001 – 2013, fatal accidents increased by 5.8% year on year. Furthermore, every year, the severity of road accidents, measured in terms of persons killed per 100 accidents, has also increased from 20.8 in 2001 to 28.6 in 2012. On 14th September 2009, the Government also constituted an expert Committee under the Chairmanship of Mr. S. Sunder, a former Union Transport Secretary, to review the Motor Vehicles Act and ensure its clauses were commensurate to present day needs. The final report was submitted to the Government in January 2011 and none of those recommendations have seen the light of day thus far.

The most striking factor of this public health debacle in India, is the complete lack of political will to tackle the problem head on. There is clear evidence of death and destructions on the roads and it is a problem that often comes home. Most people have family and friends who have been affected disastrously through a road accident – yet little attention is paid to it by the political class or the mainstream media. The system of reporting accidents in the print media remains fractured; the reportage raises no questions why and how the problem persists. Unfortunately, it seems that the value for a human life on the road remains worthless.

Today, Rukhsar has been cured of polio. But there is nobody who can guarantee her safety on the roads. India needs a comprehensive road safety law which regulates and protects road users. It needs a strong central legislation, with adequate autonomy given to States in specific matters which can significantly reduce road fatalities. Road Accidents need to be looked at as a manmade public health issue. Currently road accidents are the sixth leading cause of deaths in India and the single biggest killer of young people, aged 15-45. If sustained, deliberate government led interventions do not start now, India will be left with a problem that will soon become too big to manage. Polio has been eradicated successfully. Perhaps the time has come to tackle the silent epidemic of road accidents with the magnitude and consideration it deserves. Only then will Rukhsar, and millions like her feel safe and protected on India’s roads.

(Aditi Bhat is Associate Director - Policy & Research at SaveLIFE Foundation)

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