Sunil Sethi: Dangerous road to development

AL FRESCO

India lags woefully behind China on so many indicators but now comes the news that it's also a second-rater in the matter of needless blood-letting on the streets. China leads the world in the number of deaths due to road accidents: 107,077 in 2004; just think of the after-effects of all those gleaming super speed highways and Shanghai's wondrous flyovers that twirl upwards into the sky. India, by comparison, recorded 92,618 traffic deaths in the same year. These were the staggering numbers announced in the Rajya Sabha, in the same week that the China-influenced CPI (M) is locked in an ideological battle with the Congress-led coalition over the energy benefits that will accrue to India from the Indo-US nuclear deal. Were they intended to make us feel better?

Most governments lie and Communist governments, by definition of their controlling nature, are adept at covering up the truth. How these figures were compiled, and with so much unseemly confidence down to the last digit, is in itself cause for suspicion. China is notoriously cagey about most statistics. Present-day Sinologists are driven crazy in estimating the precise numbers that constitute its standing army or the scale of urban migration from the Chinese hinterland. It's likely that approximately 100,000 road deaths a year is a figure that's been scaled down. But dangerous driving a good metaphor for taking all the wrong turns in development.

More than 92,000 deaths on Indian streets in a year is a figure that's equally suspect. These numbers are culled from the metros and larger towns where records exist because of public outcry and media attention, as in the case of Delhi's ongoing crisis of "Blueline bus murders". Who knows how many unrecorded traffic killings there actually are in India's small towns and villages tenuously linked by a network of incomplete or collapsing roads, of broken-down forms of transport and legions of unlicensed drivers?

Nevertheless, such numbers support an elemental truth about the chaotic, unaccountable state of daily life in the two Asian giants, behind their claims to super-power status and eagerness to annex the 21st century. Among their many boasts, China's in particular, is world-class infrastructure in roads and ports. If that is so, how can such large numbers perish in road accidents every year? Creating superb highways is no assurance of their orderly functioning or regulation; it suggests a disastrous disconnection between reckless building spree and risk-free functioning, a paradigm of bad development. Of course we know nothing more of how and where those 100,000 Chinese died in traffic accidents. Just the bald fact is stark enough.

Many more than 92,000 Indians die each year from malnutrition and disease than from road accidents "" diarrhoea, alone, is said to claim 1.5 million infants a year (a death every three minutes), 450,000 Indians die of TB, and thousands of other lives are claimed in caste, sectarian and other violent conflicts. Not to speak of malnourished children, around 57 million, who may not die but will grow up deficient in bodily and perhaps mental health. Ill-educated and untrained, but desperate for jobs, they are the ones who will hit the roads as tomorrow's bus and lorry drivers. When the capital's Blueline bus scandal recently became headline news for the rising number of road deaths, many drivers turned out to be new migrants from villages, unequipped to drive buses and armed with forged licences and fraudulent permits.

Killer drivers are not restricted to the ill-educated and untrained. Plenty of recent scandals, from the BMW murder in Delhi to Mumbai's reckless brats, including the movie star Salman Khan, have been responsible for road deaths. Very few have been successfully convicted or ended up serving a sentence. And that's the difference between road deaths and other deaths from hunger or disease: they are easily prevented by strict enforcement of driving regulations and the rule of law which dictates prescribed punishment. Saving 92,618 lives is as simple a matter as that.