India leads world in road accidents
By siliconindia   |   Saturday, 12 June 2010, 18:47 IST   |    3 Comments
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India leads world in road accidents
New Delhi: While road fatalities in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing - up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available. The country has overhauled China in 2006 to top the world in road fatalities and is continuing to pull steadily ahead. Reckless driving and the juxtaposition of pedestrians and fast-moving heavy vehicles are common across India. Poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world's road death capital, according to a report by Heather Timmons and Hari Kumar. As the country's fast-growing economy and huge population raise its importance on the world stage, the rising toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than a billion people safe. In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, official figures for road deaths have been falling for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations. Evidence of road accidents seems to be everywhere in urban India. Highways and city intersections often glitter with smears of broken windshield and are scattered with unmatched shoes, shorn-off bicycle seats and bits of motorcycle helmet. Tales of rolled-over trucks and speeding buses are a newspaper staple, and it is rare to meet someone in urban India who has not lost a family member, friend or colleague on the road. The dangerous state of the roads represents a "total failure on the part of the government of India," said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding. The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify his son only by his shirt. The truck also ran over a second man and drove away. The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing traffic laws or take bribes to ignore them; heavy vehicles, pedestrians, bullock carts and bicycles share roadways; punishment for violators is lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver's licenses are easy to get with a bribe. Kamal Nath, India's Minister of Road Transport and Highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a "priority" for the national government. "Road safety is one of the major issues" the ministry is addressing, he said. The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation to that effect in Parliament. International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act. Bringing down road deaths "requires political commitment at the highest level," said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the department of violence and injury prevention at the World Health Organization. India's government is "just waking up to the issue," he said.