A study for the Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP), which includes the FIA Foundation amongst its members, has revealed that seventy per cent of families in the Indian city of Bangalore and almost half of rural households in Bangladesh whose members were killed or injured in a crash suffered a loss of income.
Road crashes impose a double financial burden on poor households, for while not only facing unexpected medical, if not funeral, costs, they also lose the income of the victim and/or carer. Poor urban Bangladeshi households paid the equivalent of almost three months’ household income on funerals.
The poor have less job security, and fewer than half of those seriously injured in road accidents were able to return to their previous job. Thus, in addition to the time spent recovering - medical recovery averaged over two months - and any carer's time, poor households also lost income while the victim sought new work. Bangladeshi rural poor who were seriously injured in crashes took significantly longer than the non-poor to find new work: an average of 57 days compared to 27 days.
Poor households were often also pushed further into debt, as borrowing money was the most common response to the costs incurred by a road death or serious injury. Two-thirds of poor Bangladeshi households in this situation borrowed money, a figure significantly higher than for the non-poor. A similar situation was found in Bangalore, where two thirds of the seriously injured and the same proportion of poor urban bereaved households arranged a loan.
Virtually no households received compensation from insurance, while only 13 per cent of urban poor and 27 per cent of rural poor Bangladeshi households received a private settlement.
More information on the report ‘The involvement and impact of road crashes on the poor: Bangladesh & India case studies’ is available from GRSP www.grsproadsafety.org