Today, like probably every other day, there will be about 410 unnatural and violent deaths on the Indian roads that goes unheard as estimated by the Transport Research wing under Ministry of Road Transport & Highways, Government of India. As a nation obsessed with drama and cinema that is served to us in the name of visual news channels, we rarely get time to devise ingenious ways to deal with the development. There is too much reaction to deal with. Where is the time for any proactive action?
The challenge is colossal by any means, considering that there are more than 220 million vehicles running on 1,65,000 Km of National Highways and 1,80,000 Km of State Highways. That is 345,000 km of highways. There are 2.9 million additions on roads every year according to the society for Indian automobile manufacturers association. Do we see a succinct connection with life running at a density of 85 vehicles per km? We as Indians are price sensitive when it comes to car purchases. Low-cost and no-frills compact cars have long been sold by companies like Tata Motors, Maruti Suzuki India, Renault SA and Hyundai Motor Co. These budget vehicles are usually priced around Rs 4 to 5 lakhs.
Further, the U.K.-based non-profit Global NCAP, which studies the quality of vehicles, has over the years assigned a zero-star rating to many small vehicles sold in India, an assessment that there could be life threatening injuries in a crash at 40 miles per hour. Past efforts in India to boost road safety haven’t taken off, and the success of the proposed Act by the government, will depend on how strictly it is implemented. The new law is likely to require that the manufacturers add a string of features like airbags, audio speed warnings and anti-lock braking systems that are bound to raise the price bar. Automobile syndicates could also be a power to contend with.
While car drivers and passengers represent the largest category of road traffic deaths, pedestrians are the second largest, ahead of drivers and passengers of motorcycles and cyclists. Road users on two-wheelers are the most vulnerable, constituting 34.8 per cent of total persons killed in 2016. The other road users killed in road accidents used cars, taxies, vans and other light and medium motor vehicles. Impassionedly looked at, these percentage deaths are 17.9 due to trucks, 11.2 due to pedestrians, 10.5 due to buses, 6.6 due to auto rickshaws and 4.7 due to others motor vehicles. Any death of a citizen due to any cause is a matter of concern. More so, when such is associated with vehicles that are explicitly designed to ease commuting between cities, towns, villages and roads that are built to transport safely. Road safety assumes prime importance in both the cases and mitigation effects of trauma must be addressed both by active and passive efforts.
While the next important highway death will not even be counted in the news, let’s try and go beyond the perfunctory inertia that the news channels are lost in. Let’s create employment opportunities. Let’s create jobs. Innovation is not creation of new products or processes alone. Innovation must go beyond and create new markets as well.
I recently travelled from Guntoor to Berhampur a distance of 650 km, excellent highways with roads and roads everywhere, but not a crumb to eat or a drop to drink. While the journey was full of warehouses on either side, it had not many hygienic places to eat, such as the ones you get on the NH-1 from Delhi to Ambala or beyond.
If we were to install a shack every 3 km and equip it with 5 people to tackle breakdowns, keep eyes for safety of on-road travellers, provide first aid and utilities, we would be talking of 1,00,000 such shacks. The shack could in addition house tea, coffee and other merchandise and these shacks could even be auctioned en-masse to retail chains and advertisers earning enough revenue to take care of its construction and upkeep. Imagine a combination of Cadbury and Patanjali painted across its walls and even selling their merchandise.
Each shack could be built at a rate of 10 lakhs, like a porta cabin and with salaries etc, if it were to cost 12 lakhs per year per team, we would be talking of an addition of half a million people into the jobs mainstream at a salary of 20,000 per month per such employee for the basic ones and going up to 20 people manning the larger shacks. That’s infrastructure created worth 10. lakhs, across 100,000 shacks or the total infrastructure creation of 1.5 billion USD. Add to it mainstream revenue generation across these 100000 shacks of 1000 Cr per month (@20000/employee/month/ shack across 100,000 shacks) or 120000 crores per year or another 2 Bn USD. This is about creating lighthouses for vehicles on the dark roads. To look for lights on highways is to look for a black cat in a dark room by a blind man and more; the cat doesn’t even exist.
A proposed “Vehicles on Indian Road Safety Association, VIRSA”, on the lines of ADAC, a German automobile club would go a long way. What would be the operational part for such a club to thrive? For one, it must provide 24 x 7 support to accident victims on the road. The VIRSA must operate a large fleet of mobile mechanics in yellow cars that assist motorists in trouble, may be called “the Yellow Angels”. VIRSA must also run its own modification centres, whereby ordinary vans are turned into mobile garages. Skills imparted under NSQC could easily create new job opportunities, proffering a fillip to the Skill India Mission. The VIRSA could also offer its membership to non-Indian residents or frequent Indian travellers overseas, after signed contracts with automobile clubs worldwide.
A mobile application that captures data on road, with a few photographs, can even become an FIR that cannot be infringed upon, in addition to locating nearest hospitals and transferring such data to any mobile number that is registered in the application.
It is time we disrupted the road transport safety markets with value additions that would significantly reduce the accident mortality rate or even stop the disgustingly routine crimes on women, the flip side being value added gadgets like GPS enabled, and Biometric assisted, buzzers that will transmit the coordinates over the internet. Technology is a great enabler. Why not then, create a revenue model for safety and create jobs as we hit the roads running?
Certainly, a start-up idea, that has a potential to not only disrupt the existing, slow to react, on road monopolistic contraptions, but also something that can grow to massive proportions with global stakes.
The VIRSA should be created out of a Road Safety Cess recoverable at the time of each sale of each vehicle. With a per vehicle cess of between Rs 500-Rs 5000 ranging from two wheelers to luxury cars, we could collect up to 1000 Crores that can be deployed into creating a shack every ten km’s to begin with.
Said Lao Tse, “Clay is moulded into a vessel. The utility of that vessel lies in what is not. Thus, by taking advantage of what is not, we create what is” If the media is listening beyond the din created by its own anchors and can carry this message like the proverbial pigeon to the ears of the speediest minister of roads and surface transport, we may have a plan to create up to half a million direct and several more indirect jobs.