Blood on the streets in calcutta

The boy lies on a bed in the intensive care unit of a south Calcutta nursing home, swathed in bandage. Five-year-old Sayak is on a drip, with his fractured right leg held up in traction. Doctors have just performed plastic surgery on his left arm to cover a gaping gash. The child is alert and his little head full of questions about his mother. Yet, his father Sanjiv Sinha, sitting by his side, will not tell him what happened to his wife, Shakuntala, when she tried to cross the road with her son on the morning of November 17 to take him to school. The point where Jawaharlal Nehru Road meets A.J.C. Bose Road is barely a 10-minute walk from the nursing home where Sayak is recovering. But a week after a speeding bus crushed the 32-year-old teacher at that busy intersection, the road is merely speckled with dust and paan spittle; the blood has been wiped clean. From there, it’s a short drive to Lalbazar, the city police headquarters within shouting distance of Writers’ Building, Bengal’s seat of power. Inside the red-brick building, officers with the fatal squad of the traffic police are busy adding names to a long list of accident victims. There is little else, it seems, they can do to stop the wheels of death from rolling on. On an average, 40 people are killed every month in Calcutta and almost all the accidents involve private buses, police commissioner Prasun Mukherjee points out. In fact, the police say, almost 80 per cent of the deaths have resulted from accidents involving private buses, including mini buses. Very few accidents that have led to deaths have involved state government buses, trucks and private cars. Compared to other metropolitan cities, the death toll in Calcutta is still lower (420 deaths in Calcutta against 1,782 in Delhi, 534 in Mumbai and 588 in Chennai in 2004). But then, Calcutta has fewer vehicles (11.44 lakh) than Delhi (44 lakh), Mumbai (14 lakh) and Chennai (16.44 lakh) even though it has the highest road-vehicle density. The number of fatal accidents is also on the rise in the city (420 deaths in 2004 against 430 until November 2005). This is not counting the accidents resulting in serious injuries and even disability. Last year, 1,172 people were grievously hurt in road accidents. “It’s frightening. Not a day goes by when you open a newspaper and don’t read the news of a mother or a school child crushed by a bus or some vehicle or another,” says Bonani Kakkar of PUBLIC, a non-government organisation that is planning a campaign against road accidents. The biggest worry is the administrative inability ' of the police and the government ' to do much about it. Activists believe that the law is weak and the bus unions are so strong that errant drivers are allowed to break free of legal and financial shackles. Jaywalking, too, leads to fatal accidents. But then, people are often forced to walk along the busy roads as the sidewalks are choked with hawkers and vendors. When a vehicle mows down a person, the police, typically, start a case under section 279 and 304A of the Indian Penal Code ' sections that allow an accused to get bail. Section 304A, the more severe of the two, carries a maximum imprisonment of a mere two years. In reality, very few drivers go to jail and they are often let off with a slap on the wrist. “The conviction rate is very, very low in road accident cases, at best four per cent,” deputy commissioner of police (traffic) Jawed Shamim admits. At the end of a trial, which usually takes five years, drivers are frequently let off with a fine, paid by their employers. “Drivers are simply not bothered since they know the bus owners will pay the fines,” Mukherjee says. The absurdity of the law is evident when Section 304A (causing death through negligence) is measured against other provisions of the Indian Penal Code. “Imagine, you can drive and kill somebody and the offence is bailable. But if you steal Rs 5 or a pen, it’s a non-bailable offence under another section of the Indian Penal Code,” says Joymalya Bagchi, a criminal lawyer at the Calcutta High Court. No wonder then the law doesn’t act as a deterrent. In the absence of a stringent law, there are occasions when the police slap Section 304 of the IPC (culpable homicide not amounting to murder, punishable by life imprisonment) on errant drivers. But even then, the odds are stacked against the victims or their families. When a person is run over by a vehicle, the victim’s family gets compensation under a third-party insurance scheme which vehicle owners are legally compelled to take. But if the police put a murder charge under Section 304 of IPC on the errant driver, the victim’s family won’t be financially compensated. “We pay compensation for deaths caused by rash and negligent driving, but we won’t pay a penny if the police describe it as culpable homicide or some other crime,” says Pranab Kumar Mahato, a manager at New India Assurances Company Limited. So families of victims lose either way. But what do the bus drivers gain from speeding down the mostly clogged streets of Calcutta' A lot, police say. Bus drivers in the city are not paid salaries, but earn a commission on tickets sold. And therein lies a major cause of many accidents. They often engage in a race, trying desperately to stay ahead of each other so they can take on more passengers. Replacing the commission system with monthly salaries could be an answer to this menace. Swarna Kamal Saha, president of the Bengal Bus Syndicate, says bus owners would not mind paying the monthly salaries if asked by the union and the government. “Let there be a discussion. It will make no difference to us,” he says. A driver on a busy route typically makes Rs 400 a day from commission at the rate of 12 per cent on tickets sold. Saha says the number of accidents will also come down drastically if drivers are made to pay fines. “They kill people and we get punished. As employers, we have no right to appoint drivers. The Centre of Indian Trade Unions (CITU) does that for us and then forces us to pay all fines and other legal expenses when they knock down people,” he says. The CITU top brass would rather blame the police for the accidents. “There is complete anarchy on the streets of Calcutta and I don’t know what the police are doing about it,” says Shyamal Chakroborty, state CITU president. “Police are not lily white and everybody knows what they do on the streets.” The city police have, meanwhile, sent the state government a slew of proposals to amend the law and increase the fine and punishment. Lawyers including Bagchi also feel that the jail term under 304A should be increased at least to five years to curb road accidents. But not many are sure if anything will come of it. Transport minister Subhas Chakroborty, after all, publicly defended the driver who crushed Sayak’s mother and fled, but was later arrested from his suburban home. No matter what eventually happens to the driver, it will be of no consequence to little Sayak. The five-year-old wants to know from his father where his mother is. “Tell me the truth,” he says.