India learns to love the Good Samaritan

Its roads are world’s deadliest; now people can help

Nine years ago, tragedy struck the family of Piyush Tewari. While returning home from school in Delhi, Tewari’s cousin, Shivam, 16, was hit by a speeding jeep. Badly injured, Shivam managed to pull himself to the side of the road. He asked strangers for assistance. “Hundreds of people must have passed by him in the 30 minutes he was there,” said Tewari. “But no one helped. He bled to death in full public view on the side of the road.”

“It angered me,” Tewari said. “I needed to find out why this had happened.” He left his job, and travelled across India speaking with families of other victims, as well as lawyers, police officers, doctors and activists. He discovered two important facts.

First, India had surpassed China as the global leader in road crashes. Last year, it had 146,000 deaths. Second, the Indian government has estimated that half of the deaths could be prevented if victims received timely medical care. Shivam’s case was not unique. Each year, tens of thousands of people die in India because they fail to receive help within the critical hour after a road accident. Because ambulances are still unreliable in many parts of the country, it falls to bystanders or police officers to act if crash victims are to be saved.

Tewari began asking how road safety might be improved, and in 2008, he established the SaveLife Foundation to answer that question. In trying to comprehend why Shivam hadn’t been helped, Tewari discovered that a major problem was fear.

In a national survey commissioned by the SaveLife Foundation, three quarters of respondents said they would be unlikely to assist a road victim with serious injuries; of those, 88 per cent said they feared repeated police questioning and a prolonged obligation to appear in court as a witness; and 77 per cent added that hospitals unnecessarily detained Good Samaritans and refused treatment if money wasn’t paid. The vast majority agreed that India needed a “supportive legal environment” to enable people to help injured victims on the road.

It now has one. In March, following a petition and six years of effort by SaveLife Foundation, India’s Supreme Court issued a judgment to protect Good Samaritans. Indians who assist others will no longer subjected to questioning by police; they cannot be detained at hospitals for any reason and they are protected from civil or criminal liability. This could prove to be a major step forward.

Between 2006 and 2015, 1.2 million Indians died in road crashes, and six to seven million were injured or disabled. Road deaths are the No. 1 cause of death for Indians between the ages of 15 and 49. Perhaps half of the victims are from poor backgrounds — rickshaw wallahs or daily labourers who walk or bicycle home from work after dark, when crashes most often occur.

SaveLife and other road safety advocates are contacting officials across India to publicize the law. The foundation is raising money for a national radio campaign to inform the public. A website — GoodSamaritanLaw.in — and a Facebook page provide platforms to learn about the law and how to help in an emergency, report harassment or share stories of kindness.

The law is just one of many efforts being advanced by SaveLife and other advocates to improve road safety. Since 2009, SaveLife has also trained 10,000 police officers in10 states to provide trauma care tailored for crash victims.

In Delhi, from 2010 to 2014, while road crashes increased by 30 per cent, fatalities decreased by nearly 30 per cent. India’s government has recommended similar training for police around the country. These changes come as India is undergoing a historic transformation. From 2009 to 2012, the country added 45 million vehicles to its roads, and it is expected to add tens of millions more in coming years.

But the numbers alone don’t explain why India’s crash rate is so high. The problems are systemic: India’s process for training and licensing drivers is broken and road engineering doesn’t conform to accepted safety standards.

Moreover, India doesn’t have a comprehensive legal framework for advancing road safety or a government agency to oversee it. Advocates are pushing for both these reforms.

“Unless the framework under road safety is reformed we will not see broad changes,” Tewari said, adding that it “takes a while for policies to come through, and to have impact — so you have to sacrifice instant gratification.” David Bornstein, the author of How to Change the World and The Price of a Dream: The Story of the Grameen Bank, is a co-founder of the Solutions Journalism Network.