Highway To Hell(source-Times of India)

Sometimes in life you get hit by a moment of empathy. I had one a few weeks ago. It happened while i was standing by the six-lane super-highway that circles Delhi. As the trucks, four-by-fours and cars went speeding by, i noticed a group of women with children strapped to their backs, facing up to the traffic as they struggled to cross the road. One question hit me: “How would i like to be in their shoes?”
Ministers attending the world’s first ever UN ministerial summit on road safety in Moscow today should be asking themselves the same question. They have a chance to tackle head-on a hidden pandemic that is killing and maiming vulnerable people in the world’s poorest countries on a vast scale. It is also undermining efforts to reduce poverty, draining health systems of resources, and holding back economic growth.
Few people are aware of the carnage that takes place on the world’s roads. Around 1.3 million people die each year as a result of road crashes. Probably 40 times that number suffer serious injury. Over 90 per cent of road deaths and injuries happen in developing countries. India has the highest death toll in the world at over 1,00,000 annually. For people aged 5-25, cars pose a bigger threat to life than killer diseases like AIDS, malaria and tuberculosis – and the threat is growing.
It’s generally people too poor to own a vehicle who face the greatest risk of getting hit by one. And the loss of a breadwinner and the costs of health treatment can mean a oneway ticket to extreme poverty. The human costs of this pandemic are beyond estimation. You can’t put a price on grief, trauma and the loss of a loved one. But there’s an economic cost, which also impacts severely. Road traffic injuries typically cost countries in sub-Saharan Africa and Asia the equivalent of 1-3 per cent of GDP a year.
Many health ministers are already aware of the damage inflicted by road traffic injuries. I have visited trauma wards in hospitals in India where over half of the beds are occupied by road injury victims. Treating these victims is diverting finance and skilled medical care from other priority areas.
Perhaps the greatest tragedy is the political indifference that perpetuates the carnage. We could do so much to prevent road deaths at such low cost – yet we do so little.
When it comes to avoiding road injuries
it’s all so desperately simple. Roads can be designed for pedestrian safety, by separating cars, trucks and buses from people. Governments can enforce laws that reduce speed, ensure the wearing of helmets and seat belts, clamp down on drunken driving, and regulate road users. These are affordable measures that are tried, tested but widely ignored.
When i met Delhi’s city leaders recently they seemed committed to taking action, yet face severe challenges. This is a city with an unregulated bus company that kills over 100 people a year with monotonous regularity, in which women and children sit on the back of motorcycles with no helmets, and in which disregard for basic traffic rules is the norm. Is it really beyond a country that is a world leader in economic growth and can put a satellite into orbit, to enforce basic traffic laws?
It’s not just developing country governments that need to act more decisively. Aid donors like the World Bank are investing huge sums on road networks – and almost nothing on road safety. It goes without saying that roads are vital for development. But in their neglect, these policies are killing people. Surely donors have to think more about the security of the people they are supposed to be helping.
Scratch the surface, and government planners are measuring success in kilometres of metalled roads. This approach combines indefensible ethics with illiterate economics. The simple truth is that our current approach is unsustainable and unaffordable.
There is an alternative path – and it starts in Moscow. The Make Roads Safe campaign is calling on the ministerial conference to prepare the ground for a UN Decade of Action on road safety. Through global collaboration we could halve the projected increase in traffic-related death and injury by 2020, saving five million lives and preventing 50 million injuries. As part of the package, we are calling on aid donors to spend $300 million on a plan to get national road safety initiatives moving.
Of course, there are many people in governments across the world who will see the Moscow summit as a diversion from the big ticket issues of economic growth, security and climate change. For them, i have just one plea. Try a little empathy. Next time your motorcade is heading along the metalled highway to the airport, take a look at the kids braving the high-speed traffic en route to school – and try imagining that they are your kids.
The writer is an actress and global ambassador for the Make Roads Safe campaign.