Last month, I travelled to India for the first time, for the bC India show in Mumbai. Until then, I had thought myself a fairly seasoned traveller: in my time with Cranes Today, I’ve been out travelling maybe ten times a year, to places as diverse as Shanghai and San Diego. But India, in very many ways, good and bad, was further from my home than anywhere I’ve been.
The good is too varied to fully describe: it should be enough to say that Mumbai, despite being the most populous city in one of the world’s biggest nations, manages to be beautiful and inspiring. Its people seem to balance the struggle to make better lives for themselves with friendliness and community spirit.
I saw the bad most clearly from a cab. Mumbai’s roads are, simply put, horrifying in their disregard for safety. Lane discipline is ignored completely, as pedestrians, cars, trucks and scooters weave six-wide through three lane highways. Seatbelts are nowhere to be found. Drivers apparently rely on placing the sound of a thousand horns to locate other vehicles.
Most shocking of all for me, at least, was the regular sight of (almost always) men on scooters, wearing helmets, with their tiny children on the back, clinging to the back of their dad’s T-shirt, with no protection.
My first reaction to this was rage: I wanted to jump from the cab and berate these men for being such lousy fathers. But the more I thought about it, the more I saw the same thing happen, the more it came to me this cannot be simply a case of neglect or disregard for ones child. I can’t think it possible for any man to not want to take the most dangerous position, when it is a choice between him and his kid.
Why then does it happen? It seems to me that this sums up one of the problems of getting people anywhere to choose safety. First, arguments for safe choices need to be made clearly and explained well to people. Secondly, regulations need to make sense in that light.
I remember, as I grew up in Britain, immense contempt for new rules that mandate seat belts for car passengers. Those rules are now accepted. The only explanation I can see for these Indian men’s behaviour is that their government has only mandated helmets for bike drivers, and no one has clearly demonstrated the risks. For whatever reason (the need to get your kid to school, the prohibitive expense of buying a new helmet every few months for a growing child), without that mandate and without a sense that the risk is too great, parents decide to take a chance.
For all of us, that should be a constant thought: safety rules should be explained, and they should make sense.
Will North editor wnorth@progressivemediagroup.com