You’d think fatalities would be rare on India’s congested roads, what with cars, trucks, SUVs, motorcycles and auto rickshaws competing for space with each other and the occasional water buffalo moving at a snail’s pace. On the contrary, Indian roads are among the most dangerous on earth. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, around 150,000 people are killed in road accidents every year. On average, every hour sees 56 crashes and the loss of 16 lives.
“While developed countries, through well-planned road safety, have succeeded in bringing down their accident rates, India’s accident rate and fatalities are showing an increasing trend,” said K.K. Kapila, Chairperson of the International Road Federation, in a recent report.
Some liken driving on Indian roads to an extreme sport, where danger is ever-present. It’s not unusual to see families of two adults and three children riding on scooters without helmets. Then there are overloaded trucks, some with iron rods jutting out. Not to mention drunken drivers.
Yet despite the deaths, most Indians don’t wear seat belts. Those who do are more inclined to buckle up so because of the traffic police, who persistently ask for bribes from those not wearing a belt, than for their own safety.
And the deadliest drives aren’t just the big highways. Road and transport authorities can draw white lines on smaller roads without physical lane dividers, but it does not mean drivers respect lanes. They slip into the opposing traffic’s lane and things grind to a halt. As with everything, there are no hard and fast rules and it’s not easy to change the way of the people.
‘Daily massacre’
Between 2000 and 2015, some 1,649,770 accidents and 1,039,372 fatalities were registered, according to the Road Accidents 2015 Report. The World Health Organisation, however, estimates that the actual figure is higher by about 100,000.
“We need a comprehensive legislation to deal with this daily massacre on our roads. Stronger law and better enforcement are the key to reduce crashes,” added Kapila.
Reacting to the new draft Rules of Road Regulation that proposed a slew of measures to make the roads safer, Rohit Baluja, President of the Institute of Road and Traffic Education, says about 20-25 per cent of accidents are caused by the fault of the road agencies. “But there is not one case against them in which they have been booked. So there is no responsibility. It’s a time for a political awakening to fix responsibilities. Are those who make laws responsible or those who enforce these, or the agencies who design faulty roads?”
A Highway to sell
In a bid to halve road accidents and fatalities by 2020 — by which time annual car sales should surpass nine million, according to the Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers — Indian Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari announced Rs1.1 billion (about Dh60 million) to be spent over the next five years on road safety.
He added that more than 30 per cent of driver’s licences are fake, and to make the system error-free and transparent, applicants will be evaluated electronically.
Speaking to the media, Gadkari, who last month urged US entrepreneurs and professionals to invest in India’s infrastructure sector, said, “We visited New York to observe the intelligent traffic system and we are taking steps to absorb successful practices from them to make our roads safe for the people of India.”
In the 1990s the country began opening its markets to foreign investment, with a pro-growth government realising the decrepit highways could hamper the country in its race towards modernisation.
The largest and most ambitious public infrastructure project, the Golden Quadrilateral — the 3,633-mile expressway linking Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai and Kolkata to bring the benefits of growth to impoverished villages — started in 2001. It is yet to be completed.
Being a freewheeling democracy, clashes over land for the highway are inevitable. In a country as densely populated as India, every inch of land is spoken for. Towns that have been cut in half by the highway are especially dangerous, since crowds of pedestrians cross in the face of oncoming traffic, which almost never breaks speed voluntarily.
Horn, brake, pray
This situation is only likely to worsen as the government pushes for expansion of road and rail network to fill the infrastructural void.
The Narendra Modi government has committed to constructing some 15,000km of highways, accelerating to an all-time high pace of 40km a day. According to reports, the road transport and highways ministry will award projects worth Rs500 billion in public-private partnership mode in financial year 2016-17 for the construction of some 5,000km of roads.
“The road safety situation in India is nothing short of a crisis,” adds Baluja, who is part of the recent traffic management plan initiated in Puducherry.
“Such calamities must not be acceptable to us as a society.”
Indians can dodge the many adversities of the nation, but they cannot escape its roads. As a tourist said recently on a Tripadvisor review: “To drive in India you need three things: a good horn, good brakes and good luck.”