Mathura, 2016.01.12 (VT): It is Road Safety Week in India, starting from Sunday of this week. Just a little ironic that the Yamuna Expressway, which is already starting to lay a claim to being one of the most dangerous roads in India, was the scene of a number of lethal road accidents at the beginning of this new year.
See: Road Deaths the way of the future?
The gruesome incident resulted in the four women and a boy from an NRI family from Australia being killed instantly when the car’s tire burst, probably due to over-speeding, and the driver lost control and rammed into the divider.
The impact of the collision of car with divider was so intense that the victims’ bodies were found lying in pools of blood nearly five to seven meters away from the mangled car. (TOI Agra, TOI Delhi)
Scene of recent accident on YE.
The last ten days have seen 14 accidents on the Expressway, in which 10 people died and another 50 were injured.
Speeding and tire-bursts have been identified as two main reasons for accidents but no concrete steps have yet been taken to address these and other problems that result in this highway carnage.
In particular, the foggy conditions of winter appear to affect tires, which become prone to bursting. Animals (neel gay) on the road, fog, and drivers falling asleep at the wheel are other causes.
The section of Expressway in Mathura district is 42 kilometers long. Not a day seems to go by without an accident. And an average of one death every other day. Last year n the district, 57 people died and another 590 were injured in 400 separate incidents, whereas on the entire 163 km. stretch from Noida to Agra, those numbers are almost triple that.
Though India has embraced the automobile as one of the chief engines of the modern economy, the price in terms of human life are staggering. Though numbers differ according to source, the United Nations puts India (240,000) in second place behind China (275,000) in the annual number of traffic fatalities (Wikipedia).
Though this recent flurry of accidents has drawn attention once again to the carnage on India’s roads, it was already being observed in the media last year that the Yamuna Expressway might be India’s most dangerous thoroughfare: “Is the Yamuna Expressway becoming India’s deadliest route?” and legislators of both houses of parliament have been pressuring minister Nitin Gadkari to come up with some laws that will help to reduce the number of fatalities and injuries. Such legislation is apparently ready but is being held up by political considerations.
We can only hope that something is done to bring sanity into the automobile culture of India, because the cost in human life is a very high price to pay for speed.
Here in Vrindavan we have taken the position that the automobile is not giving any added value to the ambiance of the Holy City. Indeed, it is detrimental and disruptive to it. The fundamental problem is the added number of people who are coming from Delhi on a day trip, trying to cram the Taj Mahal and Braj into one lightning speed tour.
They want to dash into Vrindavan and dash out again. The question is what economic development do these people add to the local community? I have seen a family from Delhi in a Bolero outside the Krishna-Balaram temple as they prepared to return home, the mother was cleaning the car, dumping empty bottles, snack wrappers and other detritus onto the street. This is how this family contributed to the economic development of Vrindavan.
The attraction of Vrindavan IS its spirituality. To say that pilgrimage is not economically viable while this kind of commercial tourism is would be a fundamental error of logic. Let us try to revive the sattvik pilgrimage culture and avoid the tamasik and rajasik ethos of tourism for purely economic purposes.
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