Challenges to Road Safety – Harini Gona FD 2016

Road safety isn’t an issue that people are overly concerned with. To remain optimistic, we choose to believe the bad things don’t happen to us. It is better that way to an extent. We do not want ourselves to be overly paranoid and avoid ever driving et cetera. When one thinks of the lack of road safety in India, gruesome details of hurt people on the road and burnt broken vehicles on the road come to mind. India as a country isn’t censored in the morbid or the gruesome. We see our chickens skinned and hung up outside butcher stores in plain view. We have all seen the gruesome remains of accidents too. Most of us have in some way been touched by these accidents- either by being hurt ourselves, or having our loved ones in close encounters with death and worse.

The biggest challenge that road safety spearheaders in policy face is one of public solidarity. How does one appeal to a crowd for support, when the said crowd would rather not dwell on what isn’t working? As an artist and a designer, I choose to work with narratives. But how does one create a narrative about something naturally pain inducing, and somehow induce hope in the  audience? If the end result of the narrative isn’t some sort of hope, there is no real way to lull people into action.

Politicians are seriously daunted by the case that any action taken can make for or against their positions in each situation. When most of your voters aren’t interested in road safety, they won’t be very understanding if you take it up as your main fighting point in the parliament.

More than anything, this fellowship lead me to more informed questions on how to influence policy. The people I worked with this summer, are in a constant flux of gathering information, analysing it and representing it in ways that make their cause seem important to different power players. They are trying to make road safety seem like a non-politiciized issue- as politics in India are heavily leaning towards being identity politics and if a public safety issue like road safety got caught in it, we would never move forward. It has to somehow carry appeal as a nationally unified problem.

I was rather deeply hurt by one of the recent incidents. One of India’s retired famous actor-turned politician, got into a road traffic accident. It was the fault of her driver and herself, but they were well protected in their luxury car with airbags et cetera. She was nicked on her entertainment system due to her neglect in wearing a seatbelt. The flip-side of this was another not so luxurious car that got caught in this accident. The family in the car lost a child due to sheer neglect. The actor got all the care she needed and more- a lot of pity from the media and love from her fans. The girl did not get checked on by the said actor or the police officer that was more inclined on lending a shoulder to lean to the actor. The country is entrenched with ideas of of one life being more important than another. It has been rather hard to remain optimistic and I admire this organisation for keeping on with the cause despite receiving heartbreaking news everyday. I hope to start making short illustrations of hope in the world of road safety to join them.

In memory of a child lost to neglect.