Governor of Delhi, Mr Tejendra Khanna adds his name to the Make Roads Safe campaign's Decade of Action
Michelle speaks to a road engineer
Make Roads Safe campaign ambassador Michelle Yeoh has spent a week in India’s capital Delhi seeing at first hand the impact of rapid motorisation on road safety in the city’s streets.
The film star, invited to India by Rohit Baluja, President of the Institute for Road Traffic Education and member for Asia of the Commission for Global Road Safety, visited road victims in a trauma centre, debated provision for vulnerable road users with the engineer managing one of Delhi’s biggest road projects, discussed road safety with the city’s Governor and Police Commissioner and met some of the activists demanding change.
India has the highest recorded road fatalities in the world, officially at 110,000 per year. The number of vehicles on the roads is increasing by 7% each year and in 2007 more than 1.5 million cars were sold, up from 700,000 in 2003. To accommodate this traffic, and to improve economic links, India is building or widening a 6,500 kilometre national express highway called the Golden Quadrilateral (GQ) which is intended to connect the main cities and economic centres.
Michelle visited one segment of the GQ, at Mukarba Chowk just to the north west of Delhi, and met the engineers building the vast new highway. The road runs through a low income residential area, and Michelle was keen to learn what provision will be made for pedestrians once the new highway bisects the neighbourhood. Some underground walkways and cycle paths are being designed into the new scheme, but the very real fear must be that the theory, contained in the pretty and ordered scale models, is fatally divorced from the reality on the chaotic, dusty streets outside. How far will the people who throng the edges of the existing roads be prepared to walk to use the new underpasses? Do the economic benefits of not providing more crossing points outweigh the human – and financial – consequences of doing the bare minimum now?
The human consequences of Delhi’s unsafe roads are all too clear at the Apex Trauma Centre. Here, Dr Amit Gupta and his colleagues struggle against a constant tide of road injuries. A teenager with an amputated leg lies in one bed; a badly injured and disfigured man, hit by a bus, in another. In the Intensive Care Unit Michelle sees a three year old boy, hit by an SUV, now in a coma with serious head injuries. His parents sit on mats on the landing by the stairs outside, keeping a desperate, probably hopeless, vigil. The newspapers are full of horror stories. During Michelle’s visit there are new reports of road deaths in the Times of India and the Hindustan Times every day. Some are shocking in their scale: 42 people killed when a bus was pushed into a ravine. Some are shocking in their mundane ordinariness: a teenage school girl crushed to death by a lorry as she tried to cross the road outside her school; a middle aged wife and mother, a pillion passenger, killed when she fell from a motorcycle – none of the women in Delhi wear motorcycle helmets as they hurtle side-saddle, often clutching children, through the traffic behind their helmeted drivers. At four in the afternoon, Dr Gupta has only three empty beds on his wards. They won’t be empty for long.
What are the authorities doing to improve road safety? Michelle met the Governer of Delhi, Mr Tejendra Khanna, at his residence. He is committed to taking action, has a good team of advisers and is keen to learn from the experience of other cities and countries. He signs up to the Make Roads Safe campaign’s Decade of Action. With the right political leadership, improvements can be forthcoming. The police commissioner is trying to improve enforcement, targeting dangerous drivers. Yet the basic fundamentals are still missing: driver tests and proper licensing, vehicle maintenance checks, helmet laws for passengers, seat belt enforcement.
At a busy crossroads in South Delhi the collision of old and new in India is shown in sharp relief: heavy trucks and battle-scarred buses vie with horse and hand pulled carts, modern cars, motorbikes and pedestrians. Rohit Baluja’s IRTE is organising teams of traffic patrol volunteers here to maintain some order and occasionally halt the traffic to help the vulnerable cross the road safely. But when the volunteers go home the traffic continues to roll…and the casualties mount.
As Michelle Yeoh says in a series of TV and press interviews to conclude her visit, “It is a harrowing thought that for scores of people merely the need to go from one place to another is an act of survival”.