Just do better

A fortnight ago I wrote in this column about the dangers of being a distracted driver. Today I'm mourning the loss of a friend who, it appears, was on foot in Delhi when he was hit by a car. It was around 10 pm and the car did not stop. Some who have pieced together the sequence of events estimate that he lay for 20 minutes on a busy road that has three hospitals on it, before a motorist stopped and helped transport him to the nearby trauma centre. His injuries were too grave to survive. He was in his mid-thirties - a smart young lawyer, a thorough gentleman, beloved of his family and friends, full of fun.

Everyone knows, in theory, that the world can turn on a dime. We all know, in our heads, that Indian roads are lethal. It's perfectly clear that bad things happen to good people. Most days, the knowing stays in one's head. An event like this forces it straight into your heart and breaks it, and that's a completely different order of knowing.

But this is not about transience and enlightenment - it's more about how we have come to live in a country that will, as a matter of course, mortally wound a man and then leave him to lie on the road. Don't you ask yourself all the time: how have we come to live in a country where it is more normal for a driver who has caused an accident to keep driving than to stop? Where, when a passerby stops to help, he is harassed for his trouble by the police? Where, when people make mistakes, it is not just acceptable, but positively encouraged, to pull out all the stops to avoid bearing responsibility? Where criminal negligence remains simply a grumble rather than a spur to action? Another friend lost his son when the young man's car hit one of those bits of rubble that civic authorities leave lying on the road for months without any warnings. You can come up on those things awfully unexpectedly even if you aren't driving very fast. Who is accountable?

Our national talent for passing the buck is the product of a culture that penalises people for taking responsibility - not in the form of justice deserved, but in the form of impeding the process of taking responsibility, or in the form of motivated witch-hunts. A society quickly learns that there is a cess on stepping up to the plate, a cess above and beyond any deserved penalties. Pretty soon it forgets that there was ever any sense in trying.

Avoiding responsibility and accountability is in our cultural DNA. But the only way that a society can build successes is by taking responsibility - not simply to point fingers and affix blame, but as a first step towards improving systems. It means that when a child falls into a manhole and dies, someone is held to account to identify the problem and find a way to make sure that workers don't leave manholes open. When a man is electrocuted because of faulty wiring, someone is held to account and the procedures by which we maintain electrical safety standards are reviewed and improved. When a pedestrian is hit and left to die, the authorities review the way that licences are granted, and the police focus on targeting the criminal rather than people who stop to help. It means that when something terrible happens again and again as a result of a systemic flaw, we try to find ways of making the system better. The only way we can do that is to begin by acknowledging the problem.

Cast your eye over a spread of newspapers, and count the number of times you see the words "negligence" and "failure". It's a barometer for how little we ask of ourselves as a society. There might be plenty of tragic consequences for negligence and failure, but few punitive ones, and few real improvements as a result of lessons learned. So there are few reasons to make the effort to clean up our acts, be they civic, cultural, social or political.

Read Atul Gawande's excellent books, Better and The Checklist Manifesto, for an inspiring reminder of the saves that a person, an organisation or a society can make by naming a problem honestly and then finding the simplest possible ways to enable significant improvement. His description of the polio eradication campaign is a jaw-dropping glimpse at how focused and organised India can be when it wants to be.

The costs of not insisting on responsibility are simply too high. The first step to lowering those costs is to believe that we have to do better.