Drunk drivers and inadequate road barriers; between idiotic users and poor infrastructure, India has a road safety problem

The news that an allegedly drunk female driver lost control of her car, crossed the divider and rammed into a car coming from the opposite side in Delhi a couple of days ago leading to a death is yet another fatal road accident statistic in India. Yes, as modern cars have become safer, fatalities have come down. But there are several worrying issues here. First, the driver is suspected to have been under the influence of alcohol but till a blood-test report comes in, one should treat this report with some scepticism as the police nearly always accuse the driver in an accident of being inebriated. That said, other than in Mumbai where police have done a stellar job in curbing drunken driving with a massive crackdown, our cities just haven’t got this right. This must change and more police personnel should be posted to curb drunken driving; take some cops away from VIP security duties for a start.

The poor quality of road infrastructure in our country, though, often makes a bad situation even worse. Roads have to be as idiot-proof as possible because road users are often idiots. Concrete pavers doubling up as road dividers are not a safety feature. In fact, they can often make accidents worse because instead of absorbing the kinetic energy from an impact which metal and wire barriers do, concrete, particularly the low height concrete dividers that are used in India, can launch a vehicle into the air and into the path of traffic on the other side. And this can happen whether the driver is drunk, distracted or had deliberately rammed into the divider to avoid an accident. Worse still, there are far too many cases where we take road safety for granted. Work on the Delhi-Panipat stretch of National Highway 1 is ongoing with little or no concept of road safety being understood by the contractor. Across Indian highways, workers have little or no regard to their own safety and that of others, water tankers used to water plants on central verges have no warning lights and workers often use a tattered red cloth to warn oncoming drivers of a diversion. This was fine in the era of the Ambassador and the Padmini but today, with cars regularly capable of hitting 200-plus km an hour speeds, our concept of road safety needs to change on both highways and city roads.