NEW DELHI—One month after Anita Rajput’s son was crushed to death by two buses as he walked home in the Indian capital, the distraught mother cannot bear to send her remaining child back to school.
“Has anything changed? How can I let him out on the road? What if my younger son meets a similar fate,” Rajput told AFP, tears welling in her eyes.
India has some of the world’s deadliest roads, with more than 200,000 fatalities annually, according to the World Health Organization (WHO). The deaths are blamed on weak laws, which are routinely flouted by drivers and poorly enforced, often by corrupt officials.
After years of inaction, the government is proposing tougher penalties, including heftier fines for speeding and reckless drivers — currently as low as $2 — in a bid to bring down the shockingly high toll.
Victims and road safety experts have been anxiously watching parliament, where premier Narendra Modi’s government has promised to introduce a bill—overhauling a law dating back to the British colonial period.
But when parliament rose this month it delayed the bill until late April, a setback victims described as a “big disappointment for the entire country” although they remain hopeful.
“It’s worth having a new law, even if it saves a single person. I know the pain,” said Pulkit Kumar, whose spine was crushed in a motorcycle accident leaving him bedridden.
Kumar, 29, was riding home in 2011 when he was knocked down by a bus while waiting at traffic lights in Delhi’s satellite town of Noida.
Forced to quit his job and faced with huge hospital bills, Kumar is, at the least, hoping for justice. But four years after the accident, a case against the bus driver is bogged down in India’s notoriously slow legal system, and he has received no payout.
“It was a government-owned bus but I never got any compensation or at least a courtesy visit from any official,” Kumar told AFP from his home in neighboring Uttar Pradesh state.
The number of deaths on Indian roads—more than 231,000 every year, according to a WHO report in 2013—is disproportionately high. India owns only one percent of global vehicles but accounts for 15 percent of global traffic deaths, according to the World Bank.