Opinion | When Will We Become Serious About Road Accidents? – News18

Last Updated:October 27, 2024, 19:25 IST

There’s scant regard for rules, which is compounded by non-enforcement of rules and meagre penalties

In recent weeks, road accidents and resultant deaths have received a lot of attention. Nitin Gadkari has spoken about it, and MoRTH (Ministry of Road Transport and Highways) figures are horrifying. They need not be cited, either in terms of accidents, injuries, fatalities, or estimated losses to GDP. Roughly one-third of accidents occur on national highways. There is a long list of problems—missing the golden hour, lack of sufficient trauma centres, and bad design of roads or vehicles. None of these are unimportant. But my peeve is the laxity with which licences are granted and petty penalties for violations.

Many years ago, when I learnt to drive, my father insisted I couldn’t use the family car (an Ambassador) to learn. I would ruin the car, he said. Instead, he got me enrolled in a driving school. This was many years ago, so the driving school’s car was a ramshackle landmaster. The first gear didn’t work. The car had to be started in second, which was probably good for learning to use the clutch. The horn didn’t function. Two bits of wire had to be joined to make the horn work. This was Kolkata in the mid-1970s.

In any event, traffic speed in Kolkata is slow, even now. If you know Kolkata, 30 km/hour was tops, except for a short stretch along Red Road, where you touched 40. When we moved to Delhi, it was a shock. You touched 60 along various stretches. For years, I had a mental block about crossing 60 and trips abroad, with swift and modern cars and expressways never ceased to amaze me. Gradually, India changed; with fast cars, highways, and expressways, 110 and 120 became par for the course. (Those are speed limits, routinely transgressed.)

In the 1990s, I worked on a project on law reforms. In the process, we also documented petty corruption in and around Delhi. One of these was in Delhi’s RTO (regional transport office) in Janakpuri. Corruption was rampant, and touts were everywhere. Everyone was open about it. You couldn’t get anything (learner’s license, driver’s licence, commercial licence, road fitness certificate) without going through a tout. If I recall correctly, at the time (1993), the rate for a personal driver’s licence was standardised at Rs 850. You didn’t even have to take the test, learner’s or final. Roughly at the time, my briefcase got stolen from my car. It had my driver’s licence and the car’s registration certificate (RC). I dutifully filed a FIR and went to the RTO to get both. No luck. Both the licence and the RC counters wanted a copy of the original FIR. Shuttle back and forth between the police station and RTO. The cops laughed their heads off. No one had heard of multiple FIRs for the same offence. I must have made eight or nine trips before I gave up. I went to the local driving school and spoke to the owner, Goel. He smirked, with a look of “I told you so”. Without any more trips to RTO, I got both. A total expense of Rs 1500.

Why does the citizen fall prey to petty corruption? Most citizens are law-abiding and honest. They wouldn’t like to bribe, and bribing is no less a crime than accepting a bribe. The problem is that the system doesn’t allow daily life without such petty corruption, no matter how honest you are. For this kind of corruption, I think the two pillars of reduction are the removal of shortages and the removal of discretion, removing the human interface with a technological one.

In 2000, there was a National Commission to review the working of the Constitution, chaired by Justice MN Venkatachaliah. Justice Venkatachaliah asked me to do a paper on the free movement of trucks throughout India, with Article 269 thrown in. (That paper is still buried somewhere on the Net.) In the course of this, I discovered a new phenomenon, especially in the neighbouring state of Uttar Pradesh. Most truck drivers had multiple driving licences, in different names. All the names and addresses were fictitious. If a driving licence was impounded for an offence, no harm was done. There were other driving licences to fall back on. Whenever I have had to renew my driving licence in recent times (obviously a personal one), I have marvelled at the cleaning up that has been done through IT and decentralisation. At least in Delhi.

Transparency and disappearance of touts. I am sure they are around, especially for commercial licences. I am sure Delhi is not a representative sample. There are other neighbouring states, not as efficient and transparent, perhaps willingly. After all, there are powerful vested interests in favour of the status quo. Notwithstanding other reasons, my peeve for road accidents is the laxity with which driving licences are given. Think of how tough it is to get a driving licence in any of the advanced countries. Think of the premium placed on human life there and contrast it with drivers (including two-wheelers) you find on roads here. Scant regard for rules. That’s compounded by non-enforcement of rules and meagre penalties.

The writer, a well-known author and economist, is the chairman of the Prime Minister’s Economic Council. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely those of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.