A recent issue of Outlook carried a special section on road safety. The section includes interviews and articles by officials in the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, some transport and World Bank experts.

The impression given is that as soon as the proposed Road Transport And Safety Bill, 2015, is enacted by Parliament, the road safety situation in India will improve considerably and deaths will reduce by 50 per cent within the next five years.

Going by international experience, this is unlikely to happen. The reasons are many.

According to the statistics published by the National Crime Record Bureau, 141,526 people died on the roads in 2014 and 477,700 were injured. However, the estimates published in the recent World Health Organisation report, Global Status Report on Road Safety 2015, the number of deaths for India in 2013 was 207,551.

The WHO number is 51 per cent higher than the Indian official number. The Indian government has not given any official response as to why the WHO estimate is so much higher than the Indian official estimate and whether we can trust this number. Chances are that the actual number of deaths in India may be somewhere between these two estimates.

The annual fatality number is not the only problem with Indian statistics. The official estimate for the number of people injured is only 3.4 times greater than the number of deaths. This is obviously a huge underestimation as international experience suggests that road traffic injuries treated in hospitals can be 15-20 times greater than the number of deaths. This ratio is supported by estimates from field studies in India — those conducted by Professor Gururaj at the National Institute of Mental Health and Neuroscience in Bengaluru. Therefore, the number of those injured in 2014 was probably in excess of 7 million persons.

According to official statistics, only nine per cent of the victims were pedestrians and three per cent cyclists. However, our studies from seven Indian cities and a number of highway locations where we collected police reports from all the thanas show the proportions to be much higher. The city studies demonstrate that pedestrian and cyclist proportions are in the range of 27-43 per cent and 5-23 per cent, respectively, and on highways 20-34 per cent and 3-11 per cent, respectively.

The official number for cars registered in India in 2013 is 38.4 million, whereas, if we add the total number of cars manufactured in India in the previous 20 years, the sum comes to 22.7 million (60 per cent of the registered number). The Auto Fuel Policy Report (2002) chaired by Dr R A Mashelkar also reported that the number of private vehicles on the road was about 65 per cent of the official number and our detailed studies done in three cities last year suggests that the actual number of vehicles on the road is about 50-55 per cent of the official number.

The above analysis shows that we cannot trust most of the official statistics available to us. In such a situation, it is not easy to make any safety policies based on science and evidence if we don’t know who is getting killed (except the statistics included in academic studies), who is hitting those getting killed and what are the real vehicle and road design factors associated with the crashes.

One of the serious factors associated with fatal crashes worldwide is drinking and driving, but the official numbers suggest that in India this proportion is less than three per cent. However, our studies in Delhi and Professor Gururaj in Bengaluru suggest that the crash involvement of drivers under the influence of alcohol may be more than 30 per cent. In such a situation, we can only start with safety policies that have international applicability: compulsory helmet use by motorcyclists, seat belt use by all car occupants, international safety standards for motor vehicles, speed control, and control of drinking and driving.

All the measures listed above could have been implemented under the existing Motor Vehicle Act of 1988 and we don’t need a new Act for any of the above. For example, the existing Act (and associated Rules) mandates helmet use and seat belt use, allows for enacting vehicle safety standards, and limits blood alcohol levels in drivers to 30 milligrams of alcohol in every 100 millilitres of blood (most western countries except a few have standards between 50-80 milligrams).

Therefore, the problem is not the absence of adequate legislation, but the absence of enforcement capabilities and lack of expertise in fine-tuning policies that suit us.

The previous government had established a high-level National Transport Development Policy Committee to prepare a detailed report on all aspects of transport looking forward to 2030. The Committee submitted its report in February 2014 and also placed it in the public domain (Routledge: India Transport Report: Moving India to 2032). The report dealt in detail with issues regarding traffic safety and identified lack of professional expertise and independent scientific institutions as the most serious problem facing the country.

The proposed Bill has ignored many of the important professional issues and instead focuses mainly on the decades-old demands for higher fines, school education and awareness raising. Unfortunately, there is no country in the world that has been able to reduce road traffic fatalities dramatically by dependence on the latter policies alone.

The proposed Bill ignores the Committee’s recommendations that an independent safety agency staffed by professionals be set up supported by research centres in dozens of academic institutions. Instead, it suggests that the proposed National Authority (which is not independent) shall constitute many Technical Working Groups that will consist of independent technical experts (who will be temporary) from relevant industry and consumer representatives to participate in its deliberations. Such an arrangement will ensure that industry and other vested interests continue to dominate deliberations and the country remains bereft of expertise to develop India-specific futuristic design standards for our roads, vehicles and enforcement methods.

It is quite clear that the proposed Bill will not make much of a dent in how road safety is handled in the country. It is still not too late to amend the Bill to include establishment of a separate and independent Road Traffic Safety Board, which does not have the responsibility of managing day-to-day activities of the ministry like driver licensing, vehicle registration and so on.

As suggested by the National Transport Development Policy Committee, this Board should function on the lines suggested to the ministry by the Sundar Committee earlier and its main function would be policy development by professionals of international calibre. Unless this is done, we will continue to operate in the chalta hai mode.