This Week's Driving - June 13th, 2000 - Log 25

Road safety in India is invisible. Everybody pretends it doesn't matter and therefore, in more ways than one, it is just not there. This issue of edit'slog is dedicated to road safety, and to a person who was a safe pilot as well as one on whom the country had some safe expectations.

Everybody loves a good accident. This was the title of a fairly strong article I wrote years ago, with apologies to P. Sainath who wrote a far superior book along the same lines entitled "Everybody loves a good drought". The features editor of the national daily I wrote it for hummed and hawed and finally - what else - toned it down to avoid offending the various sections of society thus named.

Earlier this evening I heard that Rajesh Pilot, senior Congress leader and somebody I knew at one time, died in a totally un-required road accident. Un-required because I have driven along the same Jaipur-Mathura highway often enough to realise that it was a stretch of road waiting for accidents like this to happen. But first, the man himself.

Rajesh Pilot used to cycle from his village near Ghaziabad to the New Delhi area to sell milk, delivering it and racing back home, a distance of almost 30 kilometres, to get to school. In those days an application for the Indian Armed Forces entrance examination had to be signed by an existing Armed Forces Officer, so it must have been around 1962 or so that he flagged one down, and did so. I first came across him as a young boy at the Eastern Air Base of Kalaikunda, must have been around the late '60s or so, where he was flying Packets, a transport aircraft with a twin fuselage and supposed to be very difficult to handle. He had not taken the surname "Pilot" at that stage, since everybody around was a pilot. But his skills were well known. He was known to be a very excellent and safe pilot.

Subsequently, these skills got him posted into what was then known as "Comm Squadron", flying the VVIPs of the day, all over the country and often outside. This was on HS-748 "Avro" aircraft, some with an unwieldy third engine mounted in the centre, on top. Again, we met, must have been Palam/'72 or thereabouts. I remember actually "borrowing" a Lambretta scooter he owned at that time.

Subsequently, after years of flying Mrs. Indira Gandhi, the then Prime Minister, he decided to quit the Air Force as a Squadron Leader and joined politics. I next met with him when he was Minister for Surface Transport in the mid '80s and yours truly a young shipbroker. What impressed us was that he, unlike other Ministers, would stand in the queue to take the lift up to his office. One kept in touch with him off and on, more off than on, actually.

And then, earlier today, he becomes another statistic on India's highways. Driving himself in a Maruti Gypsy, he is hit head on by a Rajasthan Roadways bus. The bus was, apparently, totally on the wrong side of the road.

What a a waste of a good life. Snuffed out by a bus driver pelting along in another accident caused largely due to the fact that public transport, especially buses, is very unsafe in design in India.

Such buses ply, day and night, a few hundred metres from where I live. These are unsafe at any speed.

So, how are they unsafe?

For reasons best known to them, our bus and truck manufacturers stick with the old pre-World War 2 concept of separate ladder chassis with bolt on bodies made of wood and metal. This was fine when buses were smaller, overhangs shorter and engines not as powerful. But over the years, the engines went up to such an extent that fully loaded buses careen at over 130 kmph, overhangs extend to almost 50% making them almost impossible to control at moderate speeds and most of all, the imbalances caused due to these cumulative design defects give drivers a heady feeling of power because they know that people will scatter out of their way.

But the worst is yet to come. Brakes are still ancient drum technology, air assisted in a few cases. Tandem if lucky, otherwise single circuit. One goes, the whole lot goes. Front fender heights are well over a metre, actually swallowing anything that comes in the way, underneath and into the wheels. And most of all, the height of eye remains at almost 3 metres.

Pilots would know. higher heights of eye give a false feeling of lower speed and a reckless feeling of abandon. But this is a bus, driven probably by an illiterate and otherwise jobless person, arrogant in his own invincibility.

So why would the manufacturers and the other authorities, then, just improve design?

Truck and bus operators are not known for their voluntary adoption of high-cost options, expecially when the benefit goes to others. To expect, therefore, that the customer knows best, is out of the question. Given half a chance, they would love to have heavy vehicles without brakes to improve fuel efficiency. As an example, electro-magnetic retarders are now standard as secondary braking systems worldwide; in India, not one person from Volvo, Tata, Ashok Leyland, Eicher, or Swaraj Mazda that I spoke to lately even knew about this.

Simple honeycomb design pedestrian/cyclist savers fitted in front with lower fenders, like they have in China, would save hundreds in Delhi alone, but no, the authorities here would not even bother to discuss it. "They" need to travel abroad to see such solutions. How do you explain to them that pedestrians and cyclicts sharing roads is so Indian (or Chinese) a situation? "They" want to go to the Europe and the US.

Fatigue on highways can be experienced only by those of us who have driven trucks and buses in India. Hours of waiting at "octroi" or "checking" posts forced us to pelt afterwards, groggy with sleep. A simple "blink detector", connected to the engine or horn, would not cost more than a 1000/- rupees today. But would an owner fit it?

But the real truth is that over the years, a macabre industry has emerged that benefits from road accidents. Everybody gains except the victim himself. Often, if the victim is very poor, then their family also joins in. Not just the police, but the doctors, the roadside vultures (human and bird), the repair garage and even the new vehicle industry.

Road safety never had a chance nor did Rajesh Pilot. Gone to the big base in the sky, not on a plane but thrown out of a car, so cruelly in the hot Rajasthan sun.

Official statistics show that about 85,000 people die in road-accidents every year in India.

Unofficial estimates put it at over 500,000.

The official penalty for releasing a vehicle after a fatal accident is a bond of Rs 15,000/-. The official bail for a driver involved in a fatal road accident is Rs 1,000/-.

There are no speed limits on Indian highways. Government vehicles, like state transport buses, are seldom, if ever, prosecuted.

Drivers Log
Veeresh Malik
The Edit Team
bluepencil@cybersteering.com

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