Whether it is engineering, education or enforcement, India has been unforgivably lax in the last decades. A recent study by Harvard economist Sendhil Mullainathan and others examined how corruption produces unsafe drivers — examining Delhi’s department of motor vehicles, it showed how people twisted the driving licence procedure through agents and touts instead of taking the mandated test, making roads collectively unsafe for the rest of us. What’s more, driving in India is a Darwinian test of strength. We honk our way through traffic snarls (or pretend we can, anyway), we list and weave through lanes, we intimidate smaller vehicles and pedestrians. Pavements are for sissies, jaywalking is a mark of urbanity. A clear stretch of road is open invitation to speed. We cannot seem to internalise basic information about entry and exit, right of way, yielding to special vehicles (like school buses and ambulances), wearing helmets while on a bike. Obviously, it is not intrinsically Indian to flout the rules of road safety — it is just that most of us were never schooled in the finer points of driving etiquette, or even helped along by an intuitive traffic code.

The blame also lies with inadequate engineering — the lack of large, legible street signs and dividers — as well as a weak and arbitrary enforcement system. The road safety problem is often partitioned into the need for an agency whose singular problem it is to address road safety — to oversee every detail from automobile standards to traffic-related injuries — along the lines of the American National Highway Traffic Safety Administration or the Swedish National Road Administration. Without such a systems approach, these cheerless road safety stats from India are unlikely to improve.