manoj

NEW DELHI: Sometime after dusk last Saturday, a tire on a truck overloaded with stones exploded as the vehicle drove along a highway west of Calcutta. The truck swerved out of control, the local police said, tipped over and crashed into a car traveling in the other direction.

No one was killed, but a 71-year-old passenger in the damaged car was left with serious head injuries. Because India has no functioning ambulance system, the victim, witnesses recount, was taken to a nearby village hospital in an auto-rickshaw - a slow, three-wheeled taxi, known affectionately as a tuk-tuk, for the spluttering noise made by its engine.

Anyone traveling on India's highways soon becomes familiar with the sight of crumpled, upturned trucks abandoned by the roadside. These accidents are a routine feature of modern life, as car sales soar and India's roads become more perilous.

Had the injured man been anyone other than India's foreign minister, Pranab Mukherjee, the incident would have attracted only the rubbernecked curiosity of passing drivers and the fleeting ire of those held up by the crash.

As it was, the celebrity status of the victim has prompted new unease about road safety in India.

Last year around 95,000 people died on the roads here, ranking India currently second only to China in terms of annual fatalities. Safety experts predict that because China has begun to introduce effective measures to reduce its traffic casualties, India will this year overtake it to occupy first place.

Of course, India's population of 1.1 billion makes it prone to top such charts (and World Health Organization studies show that African nations currently lead the world when mortality rates are averaged against the size of the population), but experts warn that the speed with which new vehicles are coming on the roads here, combined with the lack of government action, presages disaster.

Most of the people killed on India's roads are not the car occupants but the large numbers of pedestrians and cyclists who share the roads with them.

"India has a much more serious problem than that faced by the West. When countries become richer, people stop walking and cycling and start using cars; once you are inside a steel cage, you are less likely to die," said Dinesh Mohan, of India's Transport Research and Injury Prevention Program, explaining that the high injury rate is a direct consequence of the number of pedestrians, motorcyclists and cars, all fighting for space on roads that need upgrading.

"We may be more sustainable environmentally, but our roads are more dangerous," he added.

As usual, the issue comes down to infrastructure - the nation's Achilles' heel, always cited as the greatest obstacle to growth. A long-term lack of investment in roads here has meant that India does not have the parallel system of expressways and slower side roads that connect cities in most developed nations.

Instead there is an anarchic confusion of vehicles traveling on one road - camels, horse-pulled traps, elephants, trucks, cars, cyclists, bull-carts and tractors, all mixed up, and occasionally (for the sake of convenience) driving the wrong way down the highway.

"These roads are built for crashes," Mohan said.

The WHO predicts that if current trends continue, the number of people killed and injured on roads around the world will rise by more than 60 percent between 2000 and 2020, with the biggest increase seen in developing countries like India because of the surge in car use.

Around 50 percent of deaths every year take place in India's cities, and this week Delhi launched a zero-tolerance assault on the casual attitude toward basic driving regulations - a breezy negligence believed to contribute to the 2,000-odd fatalities in the capital every year.

On Monday, average fines were increased by 500 rupees, or $12, for offenses like smoking and talking on s while driving, bad lane etiquette, needless honking and putting unauthorized blue flashing lights on the car in an attempt to frighten drivers out of the way.

The Hindustan Times warned that the initiative might simply "encourage bribery by the notoriously law-averse Delhiite," but Delhi officials seem determined to enforce a stringent crackdown on driving offenses. The band of traffic police officers patrolling the roads was increased to 3,000, with instructions to increase ticketing fivefold.

In a study published this week, the Institute of Road Traffic Education calculated, somewhat implausibly, that car owners in Delhi are such abysmal drivers that 146 million traffic offenses are committed daily.

With 600 new vehicles heading onto Delhi's already clogged roads every day, many of the city's drivers are incompetent novices. The driving license system is routinely abused, and the traffic institute estimates that two-thirds of licenses are simply purchased, without any training or testing.

"People believe that if they have money, they should buy a motor car," said Rohit Baluja, president of the institute. "There has been a rapid fall in driver behavior. It's chaos." India's passion for the car has intensified, without any parallel improvement in roads, law-enforcement or training, he added.

For India's roads to become safer, proper licensing should be introduced, new highways should be built with the cooperation of government safety experts - rather than being contracted out to construction engineers - and a department for road safety opened in the government, he said. "But the political will is not there to do this," Baluja said.

Recovering at home, his head stitched and bandaged, Foreign Minister Mukherjee, the No. 2 in the Indian cabinet, has some time to reflect on the need to make road safety a priority.

For now, however, the attention of his colleagues appears focused on the side issue of why Mukherjee's VIP convoy did not have a private ambulance trailing it. (Prime Minister Manmohan Singh and the leader of the governing Congress Party, Sonia Gandhi, travel nowhere without one.)

"After the accident he was taken to the nearest block hospital by a rickshaw," a fellow Congress member of Parliament, Adhir Ranjan Chowdhury, lamented to the media. "What could be more shameful than this?"

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ruchi

Mr. Ranjan many injured of road accidents loose their lives due to the absence of ambulance and first aid facilities near highways everyday, it is also shameful for us.

Samething happens in 90% cases of road accidents. It is not a strange incident for us.