It was the last bus to Delhi from Lucknow’s Alambagh depot and no seat was vacant. “We were all sleeping when the bus plunged into the drain. We kept shouting for help as water gushed in. Some of us managed to get out by climbing on top of bodies,” says Manish Kumar, one of the 27 survivors of the July 8 accident on the Yamuna Expressway which killed 29 people.
Others like Avinash Awasthi remained trapped and perished along with 28 others. The clerk from Greater Noida had just bought a house in Lucknow. “The entire family had gathered for house warming. He kept saying he will catch up on his sleep on the bus,” says a relative.
Investigators say the driver of the double-decker UP Transport Corporation bus also appeared to have dozed off due to which the vehicle hit a divider and plunged 40 feet into a drain near Etmadpur. He too was killed in the accident.
Good Road, Bad Road
Cutting through farmland, the highway was built by Japypee Infratech at a cost of Rs 12,839 crore to connect the industrial towns of Noida and Agra and take the load off National Highway 19. Yet, since the highway opened in August 2012, there have been more than 5,700 accidents though the numbers have been gradually falling over the years, according to official data.
Why has the seven-year-old, state-ofthe-art road, managed by the Yamuna Expressway Industrial Development Authority (YEIDA), continued to remain risky for motorists? UP transport department officials put the blame on over-speeding, drivers dozing off, poor visibility during winters and bursting of overheated tyres.
The July 8 bus crash appears to have jolted the authorities too and they are back to the drawing board to find ways of increase passenger safety. “In a review meeting with the chief minister [Yogi Adityanath], it was decided that on routes longer than 8 hours, buses will have a reliever [a second driver]. Metal beam crash barriers will be placed on the road to prevent vehicles from overturning,” KK Singh, general manager-projects at YEIDA, told ET Magazine.
Other proposed measures to curb accidents, he said, include increasing the number of rumble strips, prominently displaying helpline numbers and stepping up vigil. Also, to avoid dozing off, motorists on the highway, who have had a full meal, should wait for 30 minutes before they start driving again, he said.
Ignoring Danger Signs
Regular commuters on the highway, however, point fingers towards the issues the authorities are ignoring. “The safety wires are cut up at some places to make passage for some illegal dhabas. Trucks often park in front of these eateries leading to accidents. These passages also let in nilgais on the expressway,” says Sharad Singh, who regularly travels on the road to go to his home town Agra. Road safety experts say YEIDA needs to set up tyre pressure checking facilities, test for drunken driving at toll gates and regularly check CCTV camera footage.
The quality of driving must also be checked and standardised, says Girish Kukreti, director, Institute for Road Safety and Fleet Management in New Delhi. “The sad part about such fatalities is that they end up becoming mere statistics after a while. A major problem lies in the way our drivers are trained. Those who are training are themselves untrained. Invariably we hear that ‘my uncle-father-brother-relative taught me driving’. As a result everyone drives differently. There is no standardisation,” he says.