Comment: Culture of accidents in India

Air travel's safer than alternatives. But why do so many die in all sorts of accidents in India?

Comment: Culture of accidents in India

Air travel is, by far, the safest way to travel. Even after a tragedy such as what hit Air India Express' flight IX-812 - perhaps especially after such a tragedy - that point needs to be made.

This disaster has been the first major air crash in India for a decade. In that time, we have had several times as many major rail disasters (on January 2 this year, three separate train accidents took place in Uttar Pradesh alone), and innumerable deaths in road incidents across India.

Statistics back this up: worldwide, far, far fewer people die per kilometre travelled by air than in any other sort of transport.

And its getting even safer; according to the International Air Transport Association, 2009 was the second-safest year for air travel ever, and was as much as a third safer in terms of the likelihood of a fatality than 2000, a brief decade earlier. (The safest year so far has been 2006.)



Psychologists have looked into the greater psychological impact of air crashes at considerable length.

One oft-quoted explanation is that a common human reaction is to "rank" disasters by "roughly squaring the death toll per event."

So a car crash in which one person dies is seen as one fatality; 100 such are still seen as 100 deaths. Yet if ten people die in one event, then that has the psychological impact of 100 accidents in which one person dies; and if 100 people die in one event, it has 10,000 times the impact of a single car accident.

So, while we react with grief and shock, it would be a severe problem if we let that overwhelm our good sense, as we look into the causes of the crash -- something about which there is still so much to be discovered.

Yet one thing needs to be questioned. Why is it that, regardless of where and how, so many people die of accidents in India?



Consider road safety. We drive slower than most comparable countries. Yet we have the worst safety record in the world, with more deaths from traffic accidents than anywhere else -- one every four-and-a-half minutes.

Rail accidents have become routine. Even our workplaces are more dangerous than comparable countries. Why? Is it because of a chronic unwillingness to follow basic procedures?

To speed, to drive drunk, to not wear helmets, on roads? To nonchalantly operate outdated signalling equipment in our railways? To cut corners in inspecting our planes? These are the questions that we, as a society, should consider.