Killers on the prowl: They are drunk behind the wheel

I am just back from a unique conference in Faridabad (NCR, Delhi) hosted by Rohit Baluja, whose passion for promoting road safety across the country is phenomenal. A businessman by profession, he has devoted most of his adult life to the cause of making our thoroughfares less dangerous. He serves as an example of how, despite all the cynicism around us, individual Indians can still make a difference to our lives. 

In Baluja’s assessment, sans any control and focused traffic education of citizens beginning from their school years, our roads will, in due course of time become unmitigated disasters. In his decades of struggle, he has battled great odds, which include bureaucratic apathy, sloth and the uppishness of the police hierarchy. It is a tribute to his doggedness that he has been able to set up a well-equipped Institute of Road Traffic Education (IRTE), a non-profit body and the College of Traffic Management attached to it, in Faridabad. The IRTE holds periodic conferences and conducts well-conceived practical training programmes so as to send out a convincing message that all the players involved — the driver, automobile manufacturer, the pedestrian, police investigators and governments — should be responsible while using the road or while controlling what happens there.

The statistics are too forbidding for any of us to ignore. An average of about half-a-million road accidents take place in the country annually. Nearly 150,000 lose their lives, and 500,000 are injured. The figures have shown no decline over the years. If you take into account fatalities alone, the rise over the past decade has been nearly 60%. Two wheelers and trucks account for most of them. 

Drunken driving and a failure to wear helmets are often the cause for tragedies on the road. Talking of helmets for scooterists, I cannot forget the zeal of the country’s pioneer in neurology, Dr B Ramamurthi, who took up the cause for the mandatory wearing of helmets by all those who drive or ride on two wheelers and fought for this till his last living day. I cannot also forgive a clement former Chief Minister, who, out of misplaced sympathy, removed compulsory wearing of helmets with a stroke of his pen. Not surprisingly Tamil Nadu leads in traffic accident figures!

A nagging question is: How do we reduce the number of people who drive while under the influence of drink? There is a need to introduce more frequent and efficient breath analysis on the highways to control this evil among truck drivers. In the cities, accountability of clubs and hotels through a mandatory provision of drivers on hire to ferry home those who had consumed liquor at these places is one practical measure that could prevent accidents.

A common practice abroad is for men to take their wives along for drink parties so that the wives drive the husbands home. This is worthy of emulation by many Indians. What was striking about the Faridabad conference was that it was held on November 16, which is now observed as the World Remembrance Day for Road Accident Victims. More significantly, present on the occasion were a few victims and their families who shared their chilling experiences. 

There is an undeniable lack of political will to alter the alarming situation. To fill the gap, in April this year the Supreme Court moved in to appoint a former Judge KS Radhakrishnan of the same Court to head a Committee on Road Safety. His presence at the conference, as also that of Justice JR Midha of the Delhi high court, an expert in the area, kindled hopes that strict traffic law enforcement with the backing of the higher echelons of the judiciary could bring about at least a marginal improvement in our roads. Ultimately, it is the responsibility of each home and school in the country to raise a new generation of citizens who will behave responsibly on our roads. 

The writer is a former CBI Director