![](https://api-esp-eu.piano.io/public/in/102/a2ic75bg-udit%20road%20safety.jpg) Dear Readers, According to a report in The Indian Express, “The Centre’s plan to mandate six airbags across all cars from October 1 is likely to be deferred amid discussions within the government on its fallout in the small-car market and a pushback from industry." Earlier this year, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways announced the minimum six-airbag rule for vehicles that can carry up to eight passengers. The government’s demand was motivated by India’s woeful safety record. “We lose about 150,000 people due to road accidents and about 60% of those deaths are in the 18-24 age group, which is a big loss. If we leave aside other things, just the loss to India’s GDP due to these deaths would be in the range of 3 percentage points,” said Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari in a recent interview. As Chart 1 shows, India has a dismal record on this count. ![](https://api-esp-eu.piano.io/public/in/102/hd7oqcyu-Roads%20CHART%201%20road-deaths-over-the-long-term.png) Chart 1 Leading the opposition is Maruti Suzuki India, which makes nearly one in every two cars sold in India and is the biggest player in the small-car segment. According to the carmaker, the government’s demand for additional airbags will push up prices of entry-level cars and likely result in further weakening the demand for cars in the price-sensitive segment that is already facing a sales slump over the last four years. This, too, is a valid concern. When the government intervenes like this in the market, it can destroy the business model of car companies. For instance, India’s second-largest carmaker, Hyundai Motor, has already pulled the plug on its new Santro in the wake of declining sales and the new safety norms. “It (Hyundai) saw the changes required to reconfigure the hatchback for six airbags as an unviable proposition,” write Mihir Mishra and Anil Sasi in the story published on Sunday. The flip side of this decision is that the first-time buyers’ choice gets reduced. Broadly speaking, there are three different ways in which one can react to this development. 1. Indians don’t care about their safety The most commonplace response is to blame the consumers and argue that Indians do not care for safety. It can be argued that Indians base their choice on several other factors such as initial price, mileage, creature comforts etc instead of safety. On the face of it, this argument is intuitively appealing especially when one talks about first-time buyers and those graduating from two-wheelers. What explains, for instance, the reluctance that Indians often exhibit in wearing helmets, especially when they are travelling on a scooter with their families? When the pillion riders do wear a helmet, it is often one of the flimsy ones incapable of providing any protection; it is worn essentially to avoid a challan. Similarly, car users resist wearing seat belts. Almost no one wears seat belts while sitting in the backseat — often viewing wearing seat belts as a punishment for those sitting in the front. This behaviour can’t be justified merely based on price. A helmet may not cost as much. But even if it does, what explains not using seat belts which are already there and paid for? One can often find taxi drivers keeping the seat belts permanently plugged in — without actually wearing them — so that the car doesn’t beep continuously; they only slide inside the seat belt when they see a traffic cop. But there are problems with this view. For one, if one believes this then there is no solution. If one believes that Indians are irrational and do not care for their safety, then there is no scope for any policy intervention or a technological upgrade or an awareness campaign. Moreover, it is hard to argue that the same Indians start bothering about personal safety as they move up the income ladder and attempt to buy a costlier car or SUV. Lastly, data from the rest of the world shows that every economy, even the high-income ones — the so-called developed countries — also went through this phase. For instance, until the 1960s, the US, too, believed that safety doesn’t sell. US automakers resisted the idea of increasing safety while European cars were known for their enhanced safety credentials. 2. Road safety is a function of income growth Look at Chart 2. It maps the long-run trends in road traffic deaths in high-income countries (HICs). It shows that traffic deaths were rising in all countries before the 1960s but began to decline shortly afterwards and have continued to decline for the five decades since. The decline in traffic deaths occurred despite the fact that vehicle ownership – and, hence, exposure to the traffic environment – has steadily increased over the last century. In contrast, traffic injuries in most low- and middle-income countries (LMICs) are continuing to rise or are stable at a high level. ![](https://api-esp-eu.piano.io/public/in/102/fmlvc9v6-Roads%20CHART%202.png) Chart 2 The question is: How did the richer countries do it? The answer: Traffic death rates are a function of income growth. In other words, there is a general relationship between income growth and road traffic injury such that when countries are poor they experience rising injuries with increasing income; and when countries are rich they experience declines (in traffic injury) with increasing income. In one of the more prominent papers, titled “Traffic fatalities and economic growth (2003), Elizabeth Kopits (University of Maryland) and Maureen Kropper (World Bank) explain the underlying logic of this hypothesis: When countries are poor, growth in income is closely tied to increase in motorization, which leads to higher exposure to road traffic injuries. At this stage, it is assumed that countries are too poor to invest in harm reduction. However, after a certain level of economic development has been achieved, countries begin to invest in road safety programs and reduce their road traffic injury rates. According to Kopits and Kropper, the turning point came at a particular level of per capita income. “The income level at which per capita traffic fatalities peaks is approximately $8,600 in 1985 international dollars,” they calculated. As such, “…if developing countries follow historic trends, it will take many years for them to achieve the motor vehicle fatality rates of high-income countries. Provided that present policies continue into the future, the traffic fatality rate of India, for example, will not begin to decline until 2042”. As compelling as this sounds, there are problems with this hypothesis as well. For one, while it charts out the path for the high-income countries, it doesn’t necessarily follow that relatively poorer countries must also wait for the increase in income levels. Moreover, researchers such as Kavi Bhalla (University of Chicago), Dinesh Mohan (IIT-Delhi) and Brian O’Neill (Insurance Institute for Highway Safety, US) found a glaring loophole in this analysis. That, in turn, led them to suggest a third way to look at this issue.
3. Improving road safety requires institutional and systemic solutions In their 2019 paper, titled “What can we learn from the historic road safety performance of high-income countries?” Bhalla et al looked at the same data as shown in Chart 2 (above) but spotted a significant insight. They found that instead of a particular level of per capita income, there was something about that period of time — in the 1960s and early 1970s — that provided a paradigm shift for all high-income countries. They arrived at this conclusion by comparing road traffic death rates in high-income countries as a function of (a) economic growth, and (b) time (see Chart 3). What they found was the turnaround in different rich countries happened at very different levels of per capita incomes but at the same time. In Chart 3 (b), the US and the UK start witnessing a decline but they are at very different levels of per capita incomes. ![](https://api-esp-eu.piano.io/public/in/102/br2p8mks-Roads%20CHART%203.png) Chart 3 “The results suggest that the reversal in trend in road deaths in HICs (high-income countries) during the 1960s is not because the countries reached a certain income threshold. In fact, in 1965 the richest of these countries had a per capita income that was more than double that of the poorest. Instead, our results suggest that the late 1960s were likely a special moment in history when countries at different income levels were able to reduce their traffic death toll,” they state. What were these special changes? “Briefly, the 1960s were also a period of paradigmatic change in thinking about road safety in many HICs. In the US, for instance, this period was one in which the problem (and hence the potential solutions) shifted from being driver-oriented to a more balanced approach, which later came to be known as the 'Safe System' approach. It included interventions that focused on vehicles, road infrastructure, and post-crash care, in a broad view of the environment in which crashes happen. The movement was led by a group of engineers, physicians, lawyers, and politicians,” they state. For instance, one little-known lawyer, Ralph Nader, wrote a book titled “Unsafe at Any Speed: The Designed-In Dangers of the American Automobile” in 1965 and it is widely seen as a turning point for car safety in the US. “Acting at a time of increasing state power and the rising consumer movement, they successfully lobbied the US Congress to pass two key pieces of legislation in 1966 – the National Traffic and Motor Vehicle Safety Act and the Highway Safety Act, which for the first time authorized the US government to play a key role in vehicle and highway safety. This in turn led to the establishment of the National Highway Safety Bureau (later National Highway Traffic Safety Agency (NHTSA)). NHTSA together with the Federal Highway Administration (FHWA) had mandates to regulate safety standards for vehicles and highways, and these two agencies played an important role in pushing the development, implementation and enforcement of many safety interventions, such as airbags, seat belts, energy-absorbing steering wheels, breakaway sign and utility poles on roadways, deformable median barriers, and guard rails among many others,” explain the authors. Upshot? Blaming Indians for being irrational about their safety is a dead end from a policy perspective. Further, while it is true that there is a broad correlation between income levels and road safety, the more salient and actionable insight is that low- and middle-income countries such as India do not have to wait until their per capita income level improves drastically before achieving improvements in road safety. The solution lies not in ad hoc governmental interventions and flip-flops but in creating an institutional framework which has a nationwide mandate and the financial muscle to bring about systemic changes. How can India improve road safety? Share your views and queries at udit.misra@expressindia.com Stay safe, Udit If you received this newsletter as a forward, you can subscribe to it, here. Do read our other Explained articles, here | To subscribe to our other newsletters, click here |