“THIS RULING WILL SAVE LIVES AND PROTECT FAMILIES”

He has learnt to live with the pain. Confined to a wheelchair after a road accident in October 1996 left him partially paralysed, 46-yearold Harman Sidhu strikes you as an unlikely crusader. Yet almost singlehandedly for five of the longest years he can recall, he pursued the courts to enforce a nationwide ban on liquor sales along national and state highways.

Responding to Harman’s first petition, the Punjab & Haryana High Court in March 2014 ordered that liquor vends should neither be visible nor directly accessible from highways. But rather than implementing what they would now see as a relatively ‘benevolent’ order, both Haryana and Punjab challenged the judgment in the Supreme Court. They would live to rue it.

But before anyone gets the wrong idea, it wasn’t the 1996 car accident that inspired Harman to take up cudgels against drunken driving. The two years he spent undergoing treatment at Chandigarh’s PGIMER Hospital, he says, opened his eyes to “realities that an ordinary 26-year-old man wouldn’t bother himself with”. Wheeling his chair around PGIMER’s overcrowded emergency trauma centre, he learnt that a significantly high proportion of the road accident injuries are in fact attributable to drunk drivers.

Stuck mostly at home between hospital visits, Harman accomplished a lot of research, including comparisons of state excise policies and patterns of highway accidents. RTI queries to the Himachal Pradesh government and the National Highways Authority of India, he says, revealed a shocking concentration of liquor vends along highways. For instance, the 291 km stretch of NH 1 from Panipat in Haryana to Jalandhar in Punjab had 185 vends—a liquor shop every 1.5 km! Things, he says, were just as bad in Himachal where a small length of NH 22 between Parwanoo and Shimla had 40 vends, some right besides the highway. “I found two

thekas just 30 cm from the edge of the road!” he recalls, thinking that “something needed to be done urgently”.

Harman’s crusade, though, is still not over. ArriveSafe, a voluntary organisation he started in 2006, is already onto its next campaign—the 100 rode pul (Punjabi for ‘bald bridges’) it has documented in the state. Lacking guardrails, Harman says these road bridges are a major cause of mishaps, like last September outside Amritsar when seven young children were killed when their schoolbus fell into a drain. Harman’s PIL seeking directions to the state government to instal guardrails on all bridges will come up for hearing in the SC later this month. —by Asit Jolly