SAFETY

By Prof. Dinesh Mohan

India Transport Report: Moving India to 2032, Part 2, Vol 2, 2014 by National
Transport Development Policy Committee Published By: Routledge, 912 Tolstoy
house, 15-17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi on Behalf of the Planning
commission, Government of India.
The Safety chapter has been published in report India Transport Report: Moving
India to 2032 which has been formulated for overall growth of country and
efficiency in the economy by minimizing the energy used and effects on
environment and climate for a long duration of twenty years. This chapter has been
written by Professor Dinesh Mohan, Volvo Chair Professor and Coordinator, Transport
Research and Injury Prevention Programme, Indian Institute of Technology, New
Delhi with review and advice from Shri. K.L. Thapar and Ms. Jessica Seddon. This
specific chapter is to highlight the safety perspectives for planning the
infrastructure and formulation of policies in development of a nation. The chapter
reflects comparison in the statistics of accidents and the safety policies in various
countries including India.
The author completely describes the chapter in very obvious manner about the
causes of death and the trend of the same in the past years and judged the
situation of India in the coming years. Statistics of deaths by various modes of
transport has been shown for the past 40 years for knowing the actual trend o f
deaths that at particular duration, the deaths increased or decreased which can be
specifically denoted a reason for the changing trend of fatalities i.e a specific kink
can be seen in graphs of each country that at about 70s, the death rate started
decreasing. Due to formulation of safety committees. Its right that due to the little
expertise, data and information, transportation safety has not been properly
addressed in India and is lacking far behind leading to increasing fatality rate in
road accidents and injuries which are even not recorded. This is due to the different
methods and procedures of recording a traffic accident by different departments
and different nations.
The chapter overall reflects the international experience of decreasing the fatality
rate after the implementation of proper policies and safety measures by the policy
makers and safety professionals after developing a proper road safety management
system. Road safety agencies promote safety with proper institutional
arrangements by drafting and implementation of traffic safety plans to reduce the
traffic fatalities by a considerable amount. In other countries, no event is allowed to
generate violence and for every death, the responsibility rests with the person
responsible for the design of that system and hence they are more dedicated to
their work and enforce the requirements and policies to reduce accident. This
approach is still not implemented in India and after each and every accident, traffic
police tries to blame the car user or the victim and file chargesheet and punish. It
has been seen that attempt of educating people to reduce crashes sometimes dont
work as wide variations are found between peoples knowledge and the actual
behavior on road.

This chapter presents the actual no. of statistics of the road, rail or air accidents by
the different agencies setup in various countries for proper data collection and
analysis. The safety research agencies formed at international, national, state and
university level presents the data in a very sophisticated manner to research on the
particular mode of transport accidents and the reason of accident which is further
investigated and improvements are made to avoid such accidents in future but in
India there are no such research institutes developed for the traffic safety except
the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme formed over a
decade ago in IIT Delhi which is the only multi-disciplinary research Centre focusing
on traffic safety in the country. For data collection, NCRB uses police record of fatal
and non-fatal accidents which is of the kind that we cannot depend on that data for
road safety policy making as its not reliable while the reported facts and data of
high income countries are somewhat similar to the actual. The data in India is not
found to be suitable for policy making and show evidence as the no. of accidents
recorded and reflected are about 80-90 times less than the actual accidental injuries
which are been treated in private hospitals and not recorded anywhere.
In India, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is the administrative ministry for
road safety and there are hardly any trained road safety professionals at central or
state level, thus the policies are not formed according to actual situations pertaining
within the country. Government of India has taken an initiative to create testing,
validation and research and developed infrastructure in country which led many
states to take initiative in promoting road safety at local level but none of them
have established professional road safety agency with trained professionals. The
non-formulation of safety policies or research centers are leading to increase in
death rates day by day which is a serious concern and needs urgent attention for
reducing the transport related fatalities.
In India, there is commission of railway safety but the commissioners have
negligible role at the operational level to verify that whether the compliances are
followed or not and thus is the result of having large no. of rail crashes with
considerable amount of fatalities. At present there are no independent academic
research centres for rail and airways and thus India lagging behind the other
countries in safety policies and regulatory frameworks which is essential for the safe
operations of transportation.
It is the responsibility of Government of India to establish the fully dedicated safety
boards/agency and academic research centres with sufficient no. of professionals to
be part of it for each mode of transport i.e. road, rail, marine or airways. These
agencies will be formulating the traffic safety policies and procedures for safe
operations of traffic on Indian roads. Govt. of India has to ensure allocation of
sufficient amount of funds for the smooth operations of the agencies for the proper
data collection, reporting and enforcement of safety measures. All the countries
that have been successful in reducing the transport related injuries and deaths have
already formed large professional agencies for each mode of transport.
The Govt. should ensure to create long term stable demand for safety work and
proper recognition of the professionals with progressive employment so that well
trained professionals are available. The board team should be about 50% of the

professional team and rest with deputation from field for assistance. The board
formed should be independent of respective operational agencies to avoid conflict
of interest. There shall be discussions on the policies formed by the board so that
the proposals formed are not stacked up in files in the ministries and be reviewed
for implementation. This will definitely reduce the transport fatality rates in India
and then India can stand among other countries with separate board for transport
safety of each mode of transport.
Transport safety management system in our country shall be such that it doesnt
play with environment and be safe and reliable. It is necessary to implement as the
major population is vulnerable to transportation related fatalities and is expected to
rise in the coming years and we will be able to reduce the accident rates with
increase in traffic volume by giving much more attention to appropriate safety
system and improvement and strengthening of whole system. The uniform data
collection system will reflect the facts and will minimize the negative feedbacks
from the opposition political parties which is a major drawback in India whose fear
demotivates the individual researchers to present the actual situation in the
country.