Chennai Bus Drivers have a License to Kill

In an article in the Hindu that appeared in yesterday's paper titled "Cracking down on the killer busses", P. Oppili cites a statistic from the Metropolitan Transport Corporation that says last year alone over 100 people died because of rash and negligent driving of MTC drivers. Read that statistic a few times and you realize that every week some two innocent people are run down by a bus driver, While Oppili states that some changes in bus maintenance could cut down the mortality rate, no amount of tracking gizmos or brake checking is going to change that fact that drivers are negligent, possibly drunk, and too poorly trained to be on the road on a bicycle, let alone a 10 ton bus.

The article states that the MTC has 6,400 drivers on its payroll, which means that every year 1 in 64 of them are responsible for a road fatality. To put it another way, in an average career of 20 years, drivers have a one in three chance of killing someone.

But the MTC says that rash driving simply will not be tolerated--and they have a penalty system for drivers who cause accidents. That is, if you call sending a driver to a driving school for two days for a non-fatal accident, and for a week for a fatal accident a penalty system. After killing a person the driver has to forgo his year's pay increment (a couple rupees a week) and has to take a refresher course. I presume the course states something like drivers should not be complete idiots all the time. Only on a second offense are drivers terminated.

I don't know about you, but I am a little uncomfortable knowing that when I get on the road and have to fight my way past a steeply swerving bus that if the driver kills me he gets what would amount to a slap on the wrist. Call me crazy, but I think that drivers have to be held accountable for road fatalities.

Bus drivers should not only be held accountable for the times when they kill someone, but should be taken to task even smaller violations as well. Whenever they run red lights, move with an obviously overloaded bus, stop in the middle of the road, or drive drunk they should fear that they could lose their job--or perhaps even face jail time. There is simply too much tolerance for bad driving here and the MTC is patently irresponsible for not holding their drivers up to sane standards.

For another post on traffic in Chennai see "Tuning into Chennai Traffic"

(Photo taken by K. Pichumani from The Hindu)