On June 19, Navroz Contractor was on his way back home with his motorcade on the service road of Hosur Road (National Highway 44) as usual. The 80-year-old Bengaluru resident was a highly respected filmmaker, photographer, music expert and motorcycle enthusiast. A champion of road safety, he died when three drunk motorcyclists who were speeding on the wrong side of the road hit him. The startling irony magnifies the tragedy of lives lost as a result of wrongful actions that are, paradoxically, both avoidable and normalised. Erosion of norms is the fastest way to anarchy. If these are not taken care of now, then road safety in India will get worse.
It’s not all bad news. According to the latest report by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MORTH) on road accidents in India, there were over 400,000 road accidents in 2021, with over 153,000 deaths. We have the highest number of deaths in road accidents in the world. But adjusting for vehicle population has shown a steady decline in both the number of accidents and deaths: from 3.5 accidents and 1 death per 1,000 vehicles in 2011 to 1.1 accidents and 0.4 deaths in 2020. This improvement has happened even though the number of vehicles has tripled and the length of the road has increased by 40%. These statistics certainly under-represent the real number – because people tend not to report minor accidents – but official data is the most reliable when it comes to counting deaths. So a positive long-term trend is a good sign.
However, there are two problems. First, there was an increase in accidents (12.6%), deaths (17%) and injuries (10.4%) in the year after lockdown restrictions ended. As per the report released by Bengaluru Police, there has been a 66% increase in booking of cases of rash driving and 36% in cases of wrong side driving in 2022 as compared to 2021. There is reason to suspect that this post-Covid decline was not just a return to normal, but a different situation. and worse trajectory.
This brings us to the second problem: We have new infrastructure but old behaviour. It is one thing to drive in the wrong direction on an old potholed road, where vehicles hit 50 kmph, and another to do so on new highways, where one can easily go at twice that speed. There have been 570 accidents and 55 deaths in the five months since the new Bengaluru-Mysore Expressway was opened for traffic. Part of this is due to design flaws, but the majority, as the authorities claim, is due to reckless driving. As the MORTH report shows, most of the accidents occurred due to high speed driving in good weather conditions mainly in straight rural areas. People are reckless in adverse traffic conditions, but beware of the winds when the coast is clear. The expressway is a very different type of road than before, but this part is important—no one has explained the difference to motorists and people who live along it. Without public awareness campaigns and driver training, why would people behave appropriately?
While the central government is pursuing a multi-pronged strategy of education, engineering, enforcement and emergency care, it has had limited effectiveness in fixing the weakest link: qualified drivers. States issue driving licenses and the way they do so is an open secret. A friend’s daughter was shocked when she learned that the driving school instructor not only took the computerized learner’s license test on her behalf, but also got 40% of the multiple choice questions wrong. Over the next two weeks he learned how to drive the vehicle, followed by a driving test which did just that. Neither the examiner nor the instructor had anything to say about driving safely and following traffic rules. How can we expect drivers to know about lane discipline, road signs, speed limits etc? MORTH plans to set up model institutes of driving training, but the effort must scale up, involve state governments in genuine partnerships and ensure that every new driver is actually trained.
In the meantime there are immediate steps MORTH can take himself. Highway safety can be improved through awareness and training campaigns for motorists, especially regular users. Those who obtain a ‘Safe Highway Driver Card’ may be offered incentives such as priority lanes at toll gates and meal vouchers in rest areas. The government’s own data shows that driving drivers to respect speed limits and maintain lane discipline is likely to record the biggest improvements in road safety. So this is a bull that needs to be tackled by the horns.
What I call the ‘Gadkari nudge’ – the beep that sounds at 80 kmph – but in an earlier column I said we need to focus on a triangle: behaviour, design and organisation. Behavior is the most flexible of the three and can compensate for deficiencies in design and enforcement. A small change in the behavior of large numbers of people can turn into dramatic improvements. If the motorcyclist on Hosur Road had not been drunk, not driving at high speed or not on the wrong side of the road, both he and the Navroz contractor would have been alive today. The challenge of improving road safety in India can seem depressingly large, until you realize that small improvements can make a big difference.
Nitin Pai is co-founder and director of The Takshashila Institution, an independent center for research and education in public policy
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Updated: July 02, 2023, 11:40 PM IST