SAFETYBy Prof. Dinesh MohanIndia Transport Report: Moving India to 2032, Part 2, Vol 2, 2014 by National Transport Development Policy Committee Published By: Routledge, 912 Tolstoy house, 15-17 Tolstoy Marg, Connaught Place, New Delhi on Behalf of the Planning commission, Government of India.The Safety chapter has been published in report India Transport Report: Moving India to 2032 which has been formulated for overall growth of country and efficiency in the economy by minimizing the energy used and effects on environment and climate for a long duration of twenty years. This chapter has been written by Professor Dinesh Mohan, Volvo Chair Professor and Coordinator, Transport Research and Injury Prevention Programme, Indian Institute of Technology, New Delhi with review and advice from Shri.K.L.Thapar and Ms. Jessica Seddon. This specific chapter is to highlight the safety perspectives for planning the infrastructure and formulation of policies in development of a nation. The chapter reflects comparison in the statistics of accidents and the safety policies in various countries including India.The author completely describes the chapter in very obvious manner about the causes of death and the trend of the same in the past years and judged the situation of India in the coming years. Statistics of deaths by various modes of transport has been shown for the past 40 years for knowing the actual trend of deaths that at particular duration, the deaths increased or decreased which can be specifically denoted a reason for the changing trend of fatalities i.e. a specific kink can be seen in graphs of each country that at about 70s, the death rate started decreasing. Due to formulation of safety committees. Its right that due to the little expertise, data and information, transportation safety has not been properly addressed in India and is lacking far behind leading to increasing fatality rate in road accidents and injuries which are even not recorded. This is due to the different methods and procedures of recording a traffic accident by different departments and different nations.The chapter overall reflects the international experience of decreasing the fatality rate after the implementation of proper policies and safety measures by the policy makers and safety professionals after developing a proper road safety management system. Road safety agencies promote safety with proper institutional arrangements by drafting and implementation of traffic safety plans to reduce the traffic fatalities by a considerable amount. In other countries, no event is allowed to generate violence and for every death, the responsibility rests with the person responsible for the design of that system and hence they are more dedicated to their work and enforce the requirements and policies to reduce accident. This approach is still not implemented in India and after each and every accident, traffic police tries to blame the car user or the victim and file charge sheet and punish. It has been seen that attempt of educating people to reduce crashes sometimes dont work as wide variations are found between peoples knowledge and the actual behavior on road.This chapter presents the actual no. of statistics of the road, rail or air accidents by the different agencies setup in various countries for proper data collection and analysis. The safety research agencies formed at international, national, state and university level presents the data in a very sophisticated manner to research on the particular mode of transport accidents and the reason of accident which is further investigated and improvements are made to avoid such accidents in future but in India there are no such research institutes developed for the traffic safety except the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme formed over a decade ago in IIT Delhi which is the only multi-disciplinary research Centre focusing on traffic safety in the country. For data collection, NCRB uses police record of fatal and non-fatal accidents which is of the kind that we cannot depend on that data for road safety policy making as its not reliable while the reported facts and data of high income countries are somewhat similar to the actual. The data in India is not found to be suitable for policy making and show evidence as the no. of accidents recorded and reflected are about 80-90 times less than the actual accidental injuries which are been treated in private hospitals and not recorded anywhere.In India, Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is the administrative ministry for road safety and there are hardly any trained road safety professionals at central or state level, thus the policies are not formed according to actual situations pertaining within the country. Government of India has taken an initiative to create testing, validation and research and developed infrastructure in country which led many states to take initiative in promoting road safety at local level but none of them have established professional road safety agency with trained professionals. The non-formulation of safety policies or research centers are leading to increase in death rates day by day which is a serious concern and needs urgent attention for reducing the transport related fatalities. In India, there is commission of railway safety but the commissioners have negligible role at the operational level to verify that whether the compliances are followed or not and thus is the result of having large no. of rail crashes with considerable amount of fatalities. At present there are no independent academic research centers for rail and airways and thus India lagging behind the other countries in safety policies and regulatory frameworks which is essential for the safe operations of transportation.It is the responsibility of Government of India to establish the fully dedicated safety boards/agency and academic research centers with sufficient no. of professionals to be part of it for each mode of transport i.e. road, rail, marine or airways. These agencies will be formulating the traffic safety policies and procedures for safe operations of traffic on Indian roads. Govt. of India has to ensure allocation of sufficient amount of funds for the smooth operations of the agencies for the proper data collection, reporting and enforcement of safety measures. All the countries that have been successful in reducing the transport related injuries and deaths have already formed large professional agencies for each mode of transport.The Govt. should ensure to create long term stable demand for safety work and proper recognition of the professionals with progressive employment so that well trained professionals are available. The board team should be about 50% of the professional team and rest with deputation from field for assistance. The board formed should be independent of respective operational agencies to avoid conflict of interest. There shall be discussions on the policies formed by the board so that the proposals formed are not stacked up in files in the ministries and be reviewed for implementation. This will definitely reduce the transport fatality rates in India and then India can stand among other countries with separate board for transport safety of each mode of transport.Transport safety management system in our country shall be such that it doesnt play with environment and be safe and reliable. It is necessary to implement as the major population is vulnerable to transportation related fatalities and is expected to rise in the coming years and we will be able to reduce the accident rates with increase in traffic volume by giving much more attention to appropriate safety system and improvement and strengthening of whole system. The uniform data collection system will reflect the facts and will minimize the negative feedbacks from the opposition political parties which is a major drawback in India whose fear demotivates the individual researchers to present the actual situation in the country and implementation of any policies within the country for safety of the users.