Will new traffic management bill reduce road accidents?

By Prathiba Raju, New Delhi, March 18 : Anupama Mehta, 48, cannot forget the day her 17-year-old son left home to go to a friend's place two kilometres away. Rammed by a speeding motorbike, the boy, Vinod, lost his life for no fault of his and the biker went scot-free.

"I lost my son and no one can bring him back to me. The man who killed him and ran is walking free and we can't do anything. I pleaded with the authorities to take the necessary steps to ensure that no one else suffers a brutal and untimely death like my kid. Let him be the last victim," grieved Anupama, who lost her son just two weeks ago.

"Vinod was to appear for the ongoing Class 12 board exams this year," she said. The family is still in shock.

If one goes by figures given by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, an average of 120,000 people are killed in road accidents in India annually. Three years back, India beat China as the country with the highest number of road accident deaths.

And now the country is mulling a new law - the National Road Safety and Traffic Management Bill.

Ritu Sukla, deputy director, ministry of road transport and highways (MoRTH), said, "The bill will recommend standards for construction and maintenance of national highways and safety standards for motor vehicles."

It will also identify the black spots where accidents are more, address victim compensation issues and create state level road safety boards.

"Concrete steps would be taken for ensuring safer highways. The boards would establish centres for investigation of road crashes. The legislation also proposes to create a National Road Safety Fund by earmarking one percent of the cess collection from petrol and high speed diesel oil," Sukla added.

But traffic expert P.K. Sarkar, who also teaches at the School of Planning and Architecture, doesn't think the bill can curb the rising number of road accidents.

"The bill that will soon be tabled in parliament will not help reduce road accidents as long as corruption prevails," Sarkar told IANS.

"The authorities must stop taking bribes for issuing licences and youngsters, especially, need to go through proper tests of their knowledge of traffic rules. It is alarming that around five road accidents occur in Delhi each day."

Many such accidents go either unreported or unregistered.

In recent cases reported here, those who fell prey to rash driving or drunken driving were mostly in their early 20s, pavement dwellers, pedestrians, other motorists and even cops, said Campaign Against Drunken Driving's (CADD) Prince Singhal.

Eight-year-old Deepak was sleeping on a pavement with his father Ali, a rickshaw puller, when a car ran over him. The boy suffered severe injuries.

As his family struggles to meet the costs of treatment, including an expensive brain surgery, they don't even know how and where to seek justice.

"I almost lost my son this January when he came under the wheels of a car driven by a drunk man. It was a hit and run and we could not even identify the driver since the incident happened at night," Ali told IANS.

According to CADD, more often than not, victims' families belong to the lower social strata. Burdened with hefty hospital bills and delayed case judgments, most give up their fight for justice early on.

According to a 2009 report by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), an alarming number of youths also die in Delhi's road accidents, most victims of reckless driving and callousness about safety like wearing helmets while driving two-wheelers.

Joint Commissioner of Police (Traffic) Satyendra Garg told IANS: "Around 13,000 challans (penalties) have been slapped for drunken driving in 2009. It is a reality that mostly youngsters are the victims of traffic violations in Delhi."

As per the 2009 statistics, traffic cops caught 212,000 people around Delhi for overspeeding and 617,000 for jumping traffic lights.