I remember seeing this ad for a motorbike with a handsome hunk riding it.

What a bike, what a machine, what a guy, what a helmet!

I looked at the ad. At the four-stroke state-of-the-art engineering marvel that responded to full throttle by breaking through performance barriers… whatever that meant.

I looked at the sheer excitement on the young man’s face as he looked at the road ahead, and as he felt the slim arms that held his waist…

Slim, dressed casually in a pair of jeans and T-shirt, her glasses were perched high on her head as she sat behind and looked with excitement at the road ahead…

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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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My student, Anargh, was a promising table tennis player, and we hoped that he would definitely secure a gold medal at the university level for the college. But unfortunately, one day, just 200 metres away from the college gate, he had a severe scooter accident and was critically injured on his head. He had to fight for his life for many months and miraculously survived. Five years on, Anargh is able to walk but with severe constraints, and is not yet able to speak coherently, nor is he able to pursue his sports.

Why did he have such a severe accident?

1. He did not wear a helmet.

2. He was over speeding and lost his balance.

I, too, was a victim of a scooter accident on my return from a long trip to Trivandrum. But I did not sustain any serious head injury as I was wearing my helmet and I had worn it fittingly well. 

In the last one decade of guiding an educational institution, I had the bitter experience of witnessing the death of eleven of my students. Six out of them were victims of road accidents, almost all of them avoidable had the victims taken adequate precautions. 

Global statistics reveal that every 23 seconds someone loses their life on the road! As per the W.H.O. website, Death on the Roads, of the 1.36 million who lost their lives on the road this year, 4 lakh were car users, 3.12 lakh were pedestrians, 3.8 lakh were motorcyclists and 40,000 were cyclists. Initiated by Brigette Chaudhry, the founder of Road Peace, in 1993, the U.N. dedicates the third Sunday of November to remember road traffic victims worldwide.

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