Road Samaritan

The boy was hit by a speeding vehicle. Many passersby on that busy Delhi road stopped to have a closer look at the accident victim. They pitied the bleeding teenager who was dying. But one by one they left to reach their destinations. And though some good ones wanted to help him, they were too scared to get into the trouble of frequenting courts and police stations.

The sad news of his 16-year-old cousin’s death made Piyush Tewari reflect about the fatal accidents on Indian roads. A former student of Delhi and Harvard Universities, he had read that India topped the world in road accidents, and in a decade, nearly one million people had been killed while about six million were seriously injured. If a breadwinner were to die in a road accident, what will be the fate of his family?

With his friend and mentor Kishen Mehta, 28-year-old Piyush started an NGO called Save LIFE Foundation (SLF) on 29 February 2008. The main focus of the SLF is improving road safety and emergency medical care.

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