No Safety, Know Injury; Know Safety, No Injury

With one person dying every four minutes and 837 people being seriously injured
daily due to road accidents, India features all too often in lists of countries with the
least road safety for pedestrians and drivers alike. Annually, India contributes
2,38,000 to the approximately 3,20,000 road fatalities in South-East Asia alone.
Most of these occurrences are attributed to the rapid increase in the number of
people and the number of vehicles, however, some experts claims that drunk
driving and road rage are to blame.
In the midst of all this, the enhancement of the peoples safety and their awareness
becomes paramount.
Nature has a law of equivalent exchange the more you give, the more you get. In
this case it comes down to how much heed one pays to ones own safety which
determines their likelihood to experience injury due to road crashes.
The source of these problems is us our attitude on the roads and our unwillingness
to listen to reason. We seem to forget the rules and regulations as we climb the high
and mighty pedestal of our vehicles. The thrill of maneuvering a speeding vehicle,
trying to impress someone by performing useless and dangerous stunts, trying to
reach a destination quickly because of tardiness these are all reasons why we do
what we do; all trivial in comparison to the risk the drivers are inducing in the lives
of pedestrians who themselves may or may not be following rules. As Evgeny
Morozov (writer and researcher of social implications of technology) once said,
Faster roads are not always safer roads - and virtually all societies, democratic or
authoritarian, prefer safety over speed, even if many of their citizens enjoy fast
driving. Stupidity and impatience are our enemies.
Drinking and driving is another major issue, and while warnings and fines against it
have been implemented all around the world, there is still a lot of scope of
improvement in the situation. Its like with warning people against smoking they
do it knowing its bad for their health, in which case the problem is not their
awareness but their attitude that can only be changed over a generation or two with
proper education and more stable, less stressful environments.
Pedestrians are also central in the reasoning for high death rates. They can cause a
lot of havoc while crossing roads despite there being several crossings available at
stop lights. Their impatience on the roads which are dominated by large metal
projectiles almost always faster than the speed limit is their downfall.
Given the way things are currently going out of hand, it would seem that we Indians
are not people who enjoy safety. Clearly, this sovereign nation is home to people
with a not-so sovereign attitude. However, as its citizens, it is still our moral
responsibility and obligation to prevent the issue of road safety from being taken
lightly and change India for the better and be proud of it.

Shreyans Kulshrestha
(Class XII A | DPS International, Saket)