NEW DELHI - "India lives in its villages", Gandhiji said once. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads.
While road deaths in many other big emerging markets have declined or stabilized in recent years, with the vehicle sales having jumped, in India, fatalities are skyrocketing - up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last figure available.
A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital. The dangerous state of the roads represents a "total failure on the part of the government of India," said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding.
The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify his son only by his shirt. The truck also ran over a second man and drove away. The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing traffic laws or take bribes to ignore them; heavy vehicles, pedestrians, bullock carts and bicycles share roadways; punishment for violators is lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to get with a bribe.
Kamal Nath, India’s minister of road transport and highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a "priority" for the national government. Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon. Last year during "Raksha Bandhan", a festival celebrating the bond between brothers and sisters, "Arrive Safe" enlisted thousands of sisters to beg their brothers to drive carefully.
A hundred years after the first significant inter-church mission gathering of modern times, a centenary conference in Edinburgh has shown the seismic shift in the world church. The Church is now dominated by the southern hemisphere while ‘the decline of Christianity in the European heartland’ is something delegates 100 years ago ‘could not have imagined’, keynote speaker Professor Dana Robert said. One learning point after a century of mission was that the rich should not take advantage of the vulnerable. Dr Antonios Kiriepoulous cited the example of Protestant evangelists who had seen Eastern Europeans as ‘heathens’ needing conversion rather than as ‘brothers and sisters whose Orthodox self-understanding was just starting to resurrect’. And South African theologian Tinyiko Sam Maluleke said, mission must never again be ‘what the rich do to the poor, what men do to women, what people from the North do to the people of the South’. A closing service, combining African Pentecostal worship and preaching by Uganda-born Archbishop John Sentamu, reflected the shift to the global South and growth of Pentecostalism, a movement only 10 years old when the original conference was held.
