India lives in its villages, Mohandas Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads.
India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006, and it has continued to pull steadily ahead — despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.
While road deaths in many other big emerging economies have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales increased sharply, fatalities in India have skyrocketed — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last year for which figures are available.
A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population increase its importance on the world stage, the rising death toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than 1 billion people safe.
In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, road deaths have been decreasing for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunk driving and other violations.
Evidence of road accidents seems to be everywhere in urban India. Highways and city intersections often glitter with shards of broken windshields, and they are scattered with unmatched shoes, shorn-off bicycle seats and bits of motorcycle helmets. Tales of rolled-over trucks and speeding buses are a newspaper staple, and it is rare to meet someone in urban India who has not lost a family member, friend or colleague on the road.
The dangerous state of India’s roads represents a “total failure on the part of the government of India,” said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding.
The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify him only by his shirt. Then the truck ran over another man and drove away.
Reckless driving and the mixing of pedestrians and fast-moving heavy vehicles are common. The expressway that runs southeast from New Delhi to Greater Noida, a fast-growing satellite city, cuts through farmland interspersed with new industrial parks and shopping malls. Small settlements of huts fringe the road.
On a recent day, a tractor hauling gravel was driving the wrong way, a milk truck stopped in the road so the driver could urinate and motorists swerved to avoid a bicycle cart full of wooden tables in the fast-traffic lane. Drivers chatted on mobile phones as they weaved across lanes and steered cars with stick shifts. Side mirrors were often turned in or nonexistent.
A cluster of women in saris holding small children waited anxiously for a gap in traffic so they could race across the highway. Young men in office attire waited to cross in the other direction.
The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing road laws or they take bribes to overlook them; punishments for violators are lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to obtain with a bribe.
Indian Minister of Road Transport and Highways Kamal Nath said in an interview that highway safety was a priority for the national government. The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation on that in parliament.
International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act.
Reducing road deaths “requires political commitment at the highest level,” said Etienne Krug, director of the WHO’s department of violence and injury prevention.
The government is “just waking up to the issue,” he said.
Nath, who was India’s commerce minister before moving to highways last year, has increased highway expansion plans and is raising US$45 billion from private investors to expand India’s 3.2 million kilometers of roads.
The expansion is an integral park of keeping the country’s economy, growing at about 9 percent a year, humming, Nath said.
Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon.
When highways are built, “there are always more accidents” said Atul Kumar, chief general manager of road safety with the National Highways Authority of India.
Kumar said that while his agency speaks with local residents before building and expanding roads near towns and villages, it could not always satisfy them.
“If we accept all their demands, we’d have an underpass every kilometer,” he said.
An expansion has to be “viable for bidders,” he said, and “underpasses and flyovers are expensive.”
In in other places, however, such as Brazil, new highways built by private developers have much lower rates of traffic fatalities than do other roads.
Private companies building and running new highways in India say that their hands are sometimes tied. From his office overlooking a 32-lane tollbooth, Manoj Aggarwal, chief executive of a road building company called Delhi-Gurgaon Super Connectivity, said he sees hundreds of traffic violations every day that he cannot stop.
“Look at this man in the middle of the road,” he said during an interview, pointing to a pedestrian slowly weaving his way through the traffic. “I can’t fine him, I can’t punish him.”
In 2008, 73 people were killed on just this 27km stretch of highway, earning it the nickname Expressway to Death. The death toll declined as Aggarwal added safety features that were not part of his government contract.
Shivani, 15, recently landed in a hospital with a fractured right leg and spent four days in a coma after trying to dash across a highway.
“I don’t know what happened,” she said. “I was trying to cross the road.”
She said she had to cross the busy highway to walk to school and that there were no crosswalks, underpasses or traffic lights.
Mathew Varghese, an orthopedist, said he saw hundreds of patients a year like Shivani.
The government is building “economic growth on the dead bodies of the poor on these highways,” he said.
Manoj Gupta, a consultant from Chandigarh, said his wife was riding a scooter when she was crushed by a speeding bus two years ago. The bus driver was out on bail within a few days, Gupta said. Now he stops reckless drivers to tell them about his wife, asking them to drive more carefully.
“People don’t understand the value of life here,” Gupta said.
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