Dinesh Kamath's Editorial 'Ensure road safety' that was published in Newsband

Ensure road safety

The best way to keep roads safe is by enforcing rules with zero tolerance to violations. Road safety is become such a serious issue that the court has gone to the extent of setting up the Committee on Road Safety. The orders of the court now provide actionable points with deadlines for implementation.

Police forces and transport bureaucracies should start enforcing rules relating to lane-based driving, using CCTV cameras to penalise offenders, and conduct safety audits along with experts. There is a need of scientific approach to accident investigation in India.

The orders of the Supreme Court provide a road map. The court-appointed Committee on Road Safety has written to States on the need to prosecute every case of driving under the influence of alcohol and drugs, seeking imprisonment and fine, and to treat driving on the wrong side of the carriageway as an offence which can lead to imprisonment.

Road Safety is a much ignored factor in Indian psyche. We need certain drastic measures to remove the fallacies in the system. The Motor Vehicles Act should make everyone on road duty bound to observe basic road sense.

The Police suffers from huge lack of recruitment over entire India. That should be fulfilled. More use of advanced electronic surveillance should be imposed. Fines should be increased drastically, in co-relation with the value of the vehicle. In the case of death caused by severe lack of sane driving, including over-speeding say by 25%, signal jumping, drunken driving, lane changing, ignoring zebra crossing – all these should be brought under Culpable Homicide and not 'rash and negligent driving'.

Traffic rules are the first rules to be broken to get a Macho feeling, 'I don't care' attitude and must be dealt with accordingly. Though the liberalisation economic policy has been contributing positively for the economy, the increase in road accidents seems to be one of the major negative consequences of the above said policy. Most of our roads network is not fit to bear extra road traffic or increase in the number of vehicles. There has been an increase in the number of vehicles since 1991. But there is no corresponding considerable development in the road network. Thus more vehicles and insufficient, inefficient road network seem to be contributing to the increase in the road accident. The policy makers need to act immediately on this aspect.

We need stringent imposition of Road / Traffic rules, without any ifs and buts. Road accidents are increasing alarmingly but there has not been any concrete policy towards improvement of roads and regulation of traffic. Even most drivers have not received proper training. The vehicles are mostly unadaptive to the bumpy roads. Lot remains to be done to improve safe road travel