​Crash course: On the health of transport vehicles in India

There must be better monitoring of road-worthiness of transport vehicles

On July 10, in Uttar Pradesh, a private double-decker bus collided with a milk tanker, killing 18 people. Local reports claimed the bus’s insurance had not been renewed and that it lacked an alarm system to alert the driver if the bus drifted from its lane, among other issues. Should the State government’s inquiry bear these details out, they will highlight the importance of the multidimensional nature of road safety, which banks on road and highway design, presence of roadside businesses, speed and access control, and visibility, among other factors, to protect lives.

The details should also highlight the reluctance of municipal authorities and local bodies to scrutinise public and licensed private infrastructure until lives are lost. According to the National Crime Records Bureau, 1.71 lakh people died and 4.23 lakh were injured in 4.46 lakh road accidents in 2022. A 2023 IIT Delhi report estimated there were 11.3 road-accident deaths per lakh population in 2021, which, after accounting for official data inconsistencies and underreporting, is constitutive of a public health crisis. Speed control is particularly important: it is implicated in most deadly road accidents in the country. Following the bus accident, police also told news agencies the collision had flung passengers out of the bus. Public officials know how to control speed in urban and rural areas — with strategically placed speed-breakers and roundabouts and increased police monitoring, for example. Similarly, it should be clear which portions of the Automotive Industry Standards that the bus’s condition at the time of the accident violated.

There are three ways forward. First, local authorities must enforce existing standards and have skilled personnel and proper equipment for this purpose. They must also be allowed to impose harsher penalties on transport service operators who fail to meet safety requirements. Municipal bodies must also be prevented from diluting standards painstakingly specified by engineers in order to, say, facilitate local businesses. Second, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways needs to collect and publish better, ideally complete, data on vehicle registrations, safety certificates, testing centres, criteria, and reports and audits.

It also needs to improve the quality of data about injuries and deaths, both of which remain undercounted. Finally, there is a need for greater public awareness of how the health of transport vehicles is ascertained and for access to each vehicle’s latest test report. This may be a bridge too far given both the generally complacent attitude towards quality control and unscrupulous operators’ ability to escape sanction — but it remains the bridge that will have to be crossed.