Current Events
India Traffic Deaths:
400 Every Day,
150,000 Every Year
P R SANJAI
Global Auto Safety Test body gives Indian manufactured cars a ZERO star rating. That is, for new cars being sold in the marketplace. The old cars on the roads don't even get tested.
In India, more than 150,000 people are killed each year in traffic accidents. That’s about 400 fatalities a day and far higher than developed auto markets like the U.S., which in 2016 logged about 40,000.
Now, Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s government is attempting to curb the carnage on Indian roads caused by everything from speeding two-wheelers to cars not equipped with air bags. A bill introduced in August 2016 -- proposing harsher penalties for traffic offenses and requiring that automakers add safety features -- has passed the lower house of parliament and is expected to go through the upper house in 2018.
The U.K.-based non-profit Global New Car Assessment Programme (“Global NCAP“), which studies the quality of vehicles, has over the years assigned a ZERO star rating to many small vehicles sold in India -- an assessment that there could be life threatening injuries in a crash at 40 miles per hour.
India "has delayed 20 years in making safety features mandatory," said Dinesh Mohan, a professor at Noida-based Shiv Nadar University. Globally, manufacturers haven’t usually added such safety elements "until and unless they were forced to do so by mandatory government regulations," he said.
Indian consumers are famously price sensitive when it comes to car purchases. Low-cost and no-frills compact cars have long been sold by companies like Tata Motors Ltd., Maruti Suzuki India Ltd., a unit of Japan’s Suzuki Motor Corp., Renault SA and Hyundai Motor Co. These budget vehicles are usually priced below 400,000 rupees ($6,300).
It is said that any new laws adding mandatory safety features to new cars could be a death knell for ultra-low-priced cars in India as their cost could go up by as much as 100,000 rupees.
In 2015, Renault sold its Kwid in India without a frontal airbag or anti-lock braking system, earning the model a zero rating from Global NCAP at the time. The following year, it got one star for adult occupant protection after some safety features, including an airbag for the driver, were added.
The brand in Latin America offers cars there which earned a higher three-star rating last year!
Maruti Suzuki’s popular Alto car and the Tata Nano, which was launched as the world’s cheapest car, are among those that have received a ZERO rating from the group.
Courtesy: Bloomberg Business Week. Edited for sikhchic.com]
January 11, 2018
Conversation about this article
1: Baldev Singh (Bradford, United Kingdom), January 13, 2018, 9:55 PM.
India needs CONTRACEPTION, not cars or planes or trains or cows or goddesses or gods because it's not just the 150,000 road traffic accident deaths which are tragic but the fossil fuels these greedy, selfish people need which is destroying our beautiful planet Earth!