Forty five-year-old cardiologist Pankaj Gupta and his four-year-old daughter Liveshya have become the latest additions to India’s most heartbreaking statistic — the number of people killed in road accidents in the country. The duo were crushed by a speeding bus in Gurgaon on Monday, while young Liveshya was being escorted by her father to what would have been her first day in school.

The shocking part is not the tragedy of a young family destroyed by a reckless act, or even the needless waste of life and snuffing out of potential. The real shocker is the regularity with which such accidents happen in India. Such deaths are so commonplace in India’s cities that the media now only takes care of the particularly gruesome or shocking ones, with the others being consigned to some anonymous police record somewhere.

According to the National Crime Records Bureau, a staggering 1,39,091 died on Indian roads due to accidents — that is more than 16 people an hour, making India by far the leader in the road death charts. According to World Health Organisation statistics, the death rate per one lakh population in India on account of road accidents was 18.9 last year, making road accidents one of the country’s deadliest killers. In fact, a 2012 World Bank study estimated that the death toll due to accidents is probably in excess of 200,000 per year, including unreported, and willfully misreported mishaps.

A deadly cocktail of a corrupt governance mechanism which allows unqualified drivers and unfit vehicles on the roads, a cynical industry which games regulations and bends policymakers to avoid giving basic safety mechanisms as standard fitment on vehicles, and a colossally lackadaisical attitude to safety among users has made India the accident capital of the world. More than 15 per cent of all road accident fatalities happen in India, home to barely 1 per cent of the world vehicle population. The absence of road safety instructions and the lack of deterrent punishment have only served to perpetuate attitudes. But at the heart of the problem lies a singularly corrupt transport administration and police force, which has led to a near total lack of regulatory enforcement on road safety.

This is not the ‘no harm, no foul’ kind of corruption which can at least be tolerated. This is corruption which kills. It is time we did something about it.

R Srinivasan Associate Editor

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