Speeding? Or killer roads?

From what I am hearing from sources I have reason to trust: Both accidents, Cyrus Mistry’s and Rishabh Pant’s, happened at sub-100kmph. (Note: To call 89kmph ‘overspeeding’ because the legal speed limit is 80kmph is splitting hair, and shows that you know nothing of speeding)

If that is true, I do not blame either driver for those. But I do squarely blame those responsible for laying of and maintaining our roads.

Over the past 6-odd months, since the new motorcycle, I have had the ‘pleasure’ of seeing Indian roads first-hand, though, to be honest, they have been restricted to my home state at the moment. I must say that the safety aspects of these highways leave much to be desired. If this government, and specifically Nitin Gadkari, who keeps talking incessantly and passionately about road transportation and its components (roads, bridges, speed limits, vehicles, fuels, seat belts, licences, etc.), is serious about roads as a major medium of communication in this country, they need to focus on the safety aspects that need to be baked into road design and construction, as well as maintenance, inspection, and repair.

All talk of smooth roads is useless without that. I mean, even if 90% of the highway between two towns, say Pune and Mumbai, for example, is beautifully paved road, it is the 10% that will cause 90% of the accidents and needs to be sorted out urgently. Wrong or missing markings, unsafe exits and entry ramps, badly designed animal & human crossings, uncleared debris from construction, garbage and oil/gravel, potholes and bad maintenance, erroneous banking, missing or wrongly placed barriers, thoughtlessly located toll booths, and very importantly, slack or even completely misguided (with focus on penalisation and not prevention) policing is causing more loss to this nation than the 90% smooth roads you claim to have built can compensate for.

Do something about the fundamentals, saheb. Optics will come later. By focusing on how it looks, you are putting the cart before the horse. If I could, I’d charge Gadkari, his ministry, his contractors, and all the public and private officials involved in the planning, designing, making, and maintaining the roads, as well as the highway police and related agencies, with manslaughter for every life lost.

Do you need more celebrity accidents to wake you up? Or are these enough?

Later edit: As a Facebook friend, John Jani Janardhan pointed out rightly, the corruption at the RTO level when issuing driver’s licences and certificates of roadworthiness is another level of Augean stables that needs a Hercules to clean. Like the famous Wellingtonian quote that ‘…the Battle of Waterloo was won on the playing fields of Eton’, I would venture to claim that the 155k+ road deaths in India can trace their origin in the dank, bribery-ridden officers of the RTOs across the nation.