A few weeks ago, I joined 16 other Lok Sabha MPs to urge Prime Minister Narendra Modi to introduce the long-overdue Road Transport and Safety Bill in the coming Monsoon Session of Parliament. The sheer gravity of this legislation can be grasped through a simple but horrifying statistic – every four minutes that we delay action, one more commuter or pedestrian dies in an accident on India’s treacherous roads.
Only last year, nearly 1.5 lakh people, of which 12,500 were children, were killed in road crashes. And if this is not bad enough, these numbers represent a 53.9 percent increase over the last decade and a ten-fold increase since 1970 – truly bone-chilling.
Modi’s government, on three separate occasions since Gopinath Munde’s tragic demise, promised the introduction of a law to replace the obsolete Motor Vehicles Act of 1988. But as with several other official pronouncements, the promise has not been fulfilled. A number of states have expressed reservations against changes the government has proposed in public transportation, taxation and governance. These are understandable, but they cannot be allowed to delay the critical road safety provisions we so urgently need.