Roads that killDec 20(AZINS) Mavis Russell remembers the dreadful night of 2009. She was waiting for her 29-year-old son Vikram to return home from work and decided to call him. It was their last conversation. "He was travelling from Noida to Gurgaon on NH8 and told me that he'd reach in 15 minutes. Those 15 minutes never came," says Mavis. Vikram's Skoda rammed into a stationary trailer truck in the middle of the road. He died on the spot.

The police took a while to arrive, as did medical help. "This was not disclosed to me then, but I was later told that the ambulance refused to take my son's body after he was declared dead because it would spill too much blood. His body had to be taken in a tempo. Can you imagine the value of human life in this country?" says the Gurgaon resident, fighting back tears.

India is the country with the highest number of road fatalities, superseding China, Brazil and the US. Every year, 1.5 lakh people die on roads in India, Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari revealed in parliament last week. That's more than 400 people every day. Gadkari said that these accidents cost the country Rs55,000 crore annually — about 3.5 per cent of the nation's GDP. In the last decade alone, 12 lakh people have died in India due to road accidents, while 53 lakh people have suffered disabilities and impairment.

Legislating safety: private concern, public consequences
Given the challenges on our roads, India lacks adequate legal safeguards to cover all kinds of road users — be they pedestrians, cyclists, school students or even motorists. The existing Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, has been inadequate in addressing issues of implementation, enforcement, lack of coordination between the different departments involved. And despite the Supreme Court declaring the problem of road safety a 'national epidemic' in August 2013, a new legislation was mooted only after the demise of former urban development minister Gopinath Munde in a road accident in Delhi on June 3, 2014.

Gadkari then committed to bringing a new legislation with strong provisions for road safety, replacing the current one. And the transport ministry responded last year, when it drafted the Road Transport and Safety Bill, 2015, to provide a comprehensive framework. However, since September 13, 2014, when the first draft was announced, it has been revised five times, with each successive draft being weaker in spirit than the last. The Bill has also not been listed for discussion in the last five Parliament sessions.

So it came as a surprise when Ravindra Kumar Jena, Biju Janata Dal (BJD) MP from Balasore, Orissa, decided to introduce a private member's bill: The National Road Safety Transport and Miscellaneous Provisions Bill (2015), which is comprehensive in its outreach. Jena says he was first made aware of the problem when people from his constituency came asking for help.

"I found out that in Bhellara on NH68, the highway runs through a residential area. Due to this, 64 major accidents took place in the area in the last three years alone. Thirty four people died in these accidents," he said and added that it took a vociferous campaign on his part to ensure a bypass is built.

"This is not an isolated problem," says Jena. "I dug deeper and found that while we fight in Parliament to implement the GST Bill to get the GDP to 1-1.5 per cent, inadequate road safety pulls back GDP by 3.5 per cent!"

The four Es
Piyush Tewari of SaveLIFE Foundation, a not-for-profit organisation that works for better road safety, says Indian roads are plagued by four problems: education, enforcement, engineering and emergencies.

By education, he means driver training and licencing. In India, one can obtain a driver's licence for as low as Rs100. Also, because of bad coordination between states, a commercial driver can have a licence in several states.

"The licensing system in India is convoluted, and because of lack of transparency, people go to touts. We need a transparent system like the Passport Seva Service and a central computerised database like the UID system for Aadhaar," says Tewari. "The system also does not look at how competent one is to drive. It just looks at whether you can drive or not. Moreover, there is no grading of licences – a driver with a LMV licence for a Maruti 800 can also drive a Lamborghini with a 5000cc engine."

The second is enforcement, which comes with the problems of capacity constraints and corruption. The traffic police force is ill-equipped to handle the sheer number of problems. And in places where it does, corruption is a major issue. A driver on the road can easily bribe his way without paying the requisite fine. Electronic enforcement is the way out, says Tewari. "It can book overspeeding violations, sudden lane changing, mobile phone usage, etc, without the need for a police force," he says.

The Road Safety Bill mooted by the transport ministry mandates that all jurisdictions with more than a million people will need to provide electronic enforcement.

The third — vehicle and road engineering. There are no minimum standards for vehicle safety in India, with low standards for construction, which compromises the integrity of the vehicle. As per the World Health Organisation's (WHO) 2015 Global Status Report on Road Safety, a testing project was initiated in India in 2013 on five key models that together account for around 20 per cent of all new cars sold in the country. The models were tested at both, the UN frontal impact testing speed (56 km/h) and at the higher Global New Car Assessment Programme (NCAP) speed, 64km/h. Four of the five models failed the UN regulation test, and all scored zero at 64 km/h as a result of either poor structure or lack of airbags.

In August this year, a petitioner filed a PIL in the Gauhati High Court seeking to ban small cars that don't meet crash-test norms (like the NCAP) to make cars safer. The sale and registration of Maruti Suzuki's Alto and Swift models, Hyundai's i10 and Eon and Honda Jazz were stopped in Assam after an interim order by the Gauhati High Court. The order was, however, revoked after an injunction in the Supreme Court when the automotive lobby, Society of Indian Automobile Manufacturers (SIAM), challenged it. The matter has now reached the SC, and if ruled in favour of the petitioner, it could be momentous by making crash tests compulsory.

In terms of road design, the World Bank has estimated that a road upgrade programme in India will cost $4 billion. Ravishankar Rajaraman, technical director at JP Research India Private Limited, an organisation that collates data on accidents in four major cities, says that India does not have the requisite standards of road design. Roads, he says, are not constructed keeping in mind the kind of traffic the road will have. "Most standards are borrowed from developed countries, where cars form 80 per cent traffic on the road. In India, cars constitute just 13 per cent," says Rajaraman.

Road construction standards, laid down by the Indian Road Congress, are not free for the public. "Only if you are an architect or an engineer, can you avail these for a fee," he says. "There is also no linkage between road standards and vehicular standards. And no visible signages for which there is a dedicated branch of science," he says. "There is also no concept of lane balancing when roads merge. If two lanes join three lanes at a junction, there should be five lanes at some point ahead to ease traffic."

The fourth aspect plaguing Indian roads is the crucial one of handling emergencies. The Indian healthcare system is ill-equipped to handle emergencies, says Dr Mahesh Joshi of Apollo Hospitals, who also heads the Society of Emergency Medicine. "In rural areas, emergency ambulances are shared by a heart patient, a road accident victim and a woman in labour alike. Government hospitals are usually overcrowded. And despite the Supreme Court saying that private hospitals cannot refuse victims, one needs to find out who will take care of expenses," says Dr Joshi. "It's a distributed disaster."

Ambulances provided by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) do not have paramedics, rendering them useless. If a paramedic can access the level of injury, the patient can be directed to a hospital that has the necessary facilities. In 12 states in India, the 108 service has now helped ease a lot of these problems by taking care of 30 per cent of road casualties.

Good samaritan
In 2012, SaveLIFE Foundation filed a writ petition in the Supreme Court to ensure that when a bystander helps a victim on the roads, he or she does not have to make several police appearances and go to court. While the police said they were following the law, the Foundation argued that these bystanders were simply saving lives. After a nationwide consultation, the Ministry of Home Affairs told the Supreme Court in October 2014 that it had no objections.

On May 13, 2015, the Good Samaritan guidelines came into being. As per the guidelines, any bystander, who is not a witness, will not be questioned by the police. If a bystander is a witness, he or she will be asked to come to court just once. And any questioning by the police will have to be done at a place of the witness' choosing, with the police appearing in plain clothes. Hospitals must take care of good samaritans, and the police must be sensitive to them, failing which disciplinary action will be taken. "We are now working to make that into a law," says Tewari.

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2013 data, collated from NCRB and the transport department

20 children under the age of 14 die every day on our roads. 97% of Indian roads do not have proper footpaths.

1214 road crashes occur every day in India

1 road crash death every 4 minutes

16 deaths every hour due to road accidents

377 deaths every day, equivalent to a jumbo jet crashing every day

1287 injuries from accidents every day

30-44 years: Age group most susceptible to road accident deaths in the country

Two wheelers account for 25% of road fatalities

20 children under the age of 14 who die every day due to road crashes in India

2 women die every hour due to road crashes in the country

Top 10 countries with the highest number of Road Fatalities: India, China, Brazil, U.S.A., Indonesia, Russia, Iran, Mexico, South Africa, Thailand.

Rs 9177.32 crores: Amount incurred by the Indian insurance industry on third party claims in road crashes in the financial year of 2012-2013

1,59,490,578: The number of registered vehicles in India

With 137,572 road deaths, the estimated road traffic death rate per 100,000 people is 16.6

As per a study conducted by the JP Research Indian Private Limited Between October 2012 and October 2014, there were 372 deaths on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. Of them 219 (59%) were not reported to the police. More than 40% of the accidents resulted in fatal or serious injuries. A total of 586 vehicles/road users (553 vehicles and 33 pedestrians) were involved in the 372 expressway accidents examined.

List of Dos (by SaveLIFE Foundation)

Always carry an In Case of Emergency card (ICE). It should include your contact details, emergency contact details, medical insurance number, blood group and insurance provider's name.

In case of low visibility, don't drive on high beam. And indicate well in advance.

Drive slowly and follow lane details.

As a pedestrian, do not cross the road at bends. If possible, wear light clothes or reflective jewellery at night.

If you have a two-wheeler, use a strobe light at night and a daytime running light during the night.

Do not let a child below 12 sit on the front seat of a car. If a child below 15 is riding pillion on a two-wheeler, ensuring that s/he has a child-helmet on.

If you have met with an accident and are in pain, never get up with a jerk. If you are bleeding heavily, take a piece of clothing off and tie it around the wound to stop the blood. If you are dizzy, lie down on the edge of the road with your left arm under your head. This will ensure that blood does not clog your airway.