Going by the amount of social media chatter around any NCAP test, you’d think India is one safety-obsessed nation. Awareness is rising, but safety is far from ingrained in our ethos like it is in, say, Japan. We all know the current state of road safety is appalling, but I’m not talking about driving manners or vehicle collisions or crash ratings. Of late, there’s another aspect of road safety that’s really been bothering me; the road itself and everything around it.
During the rains in Mumbai last month, two girls were electrocuted in a water-logged street. Luckily, timely intervention from a passer-by and medical treatment at a hospital saved them. Last year, an auto-rickshaw driver had his head
pierced by a falling iron rod from metro construction; thankfully emergency neurosurgery saved him too. Not everyone is so lucky though, if you can even call these accidents lucky. A concrete slab from an under-construction girder bridge fell onto a moving auto-rickshaw and car and resulted in one death and multiple injuries.
You would have read the horrific news of a 25-year-old biker in Delhi who died after his motorcycle plunged into an unbarricaded, 14-foot-deep construction pit dug up and left open. And it’s not just bikes; people have fallen into open manholes, flooded over with water, and lost their lives, and recently a 20-year-old student died after his car plunged into an open drain. Two years ago, a massive illegal billboard blew over and killed 17 people and injured over 75 others during heavy winds in Mumbai. This monsoon season, a tree collapsed onto a school bus and took the life of an 11-year-old child.
This is the aspect of road safety that has been bothering me recently, not because car crashes and other accidents do not, but because these are all too often termed ‘freak accidents’ or ‘random happenings’. Nonsense! These are not freak incidents, but accidents caused by negligence and unaccountability. So many folks say, ‘oh, his/her time had come’. Again, nonsense. Would you say all those poor kids who died in Africa due to starvation died because their time had come? No. They died because of human action, or inaction.
So, really, I write this column only to highlight this fact; to remind us all that it isn’t random. As the saying goes, ‘everything happens for a reason’. Here it’s callousness, from those in charge and from us. So, the next time you express outrage over a non-5-star NCAP-rated car, spare some words of outrage for these incidents too.