The latest tragic death of Sangeetha Gaude and her three-year old nephew Devansh Rajesh Zalmi who came under the wheels of a speeding crane at Farmagudi, which incidentally occurred during a recent Road Safety Week, only goes to prove the hypocrisy of the government and collaborating social entrepreneurs involved in promoting road safety. The latest victim of Goa’s criminal politics, Sangeetha was possibly not even aware that her village road which had been upgraded to a National Highway would no more provide her the traditional luxury of crossing leisurely at undesignated locations to make household purchases from the shops or the market opposite her home. Families living on both sides of the traditional village roads in Goa are not made aware of the consequences of a major district road or National Highway forced in their midst, which would mean travelling 2 kms to find a crossing to get across to visit their neighbour or relatives living on the opposite side. The public is hardly aware that road medians which now have illegal gaps every few metres for crossing to temporarily pacify residents and businessmen and prevent opposition, like the one from the O’Coqueiro junction till the PDA colony at Porvorim, will no more exist once the National Highway 66 gets fully commissioned.
Road safety in Goa is a sham to entertain public with some novelty which is globally fashionable and appears progressive without adapting it to local realities. That innocent little Angel who met her tragic end on that Ribandar causeway some years ago may now just be a commodity for the ‘Roads have Stories’ in the economic model on Road Safety. It’s public knowledge that for government agencies any awareness activity is more about spending the allocated funds rather than generating any qualitative long-term changes. Civil society desiring a share of this government moolah has to speak the government jargon. And how else could this be done, other than by diverting public gaze towards the dead and giving them (public) a false sense of security with traffic sentinel apps and the road safety patrol and traffic warden schemes, which are probably inspired by the ‘desh ki chowkidar’ to help bury the criminal violations and negligence of the concerned road and traffic authorities which are the root cause for many road accidents?
Road safety in Goa seems to suffer from the same social evil like caste and class prejudice. The chauffeur driven traffic officers and social entrepreneurs will never understand the struggles of the two-wheeler riders and pedestrians on the roads. Therefore, the rights of pedestrians, cyclists and other two-wheelers are not a top priority in a road safety week. The gaping potholes, humps, and furrows on road surfaces get conveniently ignored in the story. The present dangerous condition of road surfaces and a blind eye from authorities to violations in setbacks, like that of the CHOGM road and many other roads in and around a developing township of Porvorim, may not find their way into the ‘Roads have Stories’. And while the statistics on road deaths get sensationalised by traffic authorities, the information on the number of roads unfit or unsafe for motor transport and the number of roads and related facilities violative of the prescribed IRC codes which facilitate road accidents will continue to be concealed in the cupboards. So, up scaling the rhetoric on helmets, seat belts, drunken driving, use of mobiles while driving or over speeding helps bury this criminal negligence by various government authorities.
The impression one often gets is that certain road safety measures or laws are put in place only to encourage violations by the public in order to generate revenue for the State and provide scope for corruption through penalisation. Road sentinels and road wardens are about generating revenue for the State on a commission basis by tracking petty traffic violations while ignoring more serious offences and the poor physical road conditions. It’s common knowledge that the ‘ease of doing business’ can get the traffic cop to look the other side while customers of casinos, shopping malls and 5-star hotels violate ‘no stopping zones’ and ‘no parking zones’ at a pre-arranged fee by the industry towards the charity fund of the politicians and traffic authorities.
The “Roads have Stories” will stop short of exposing the government agencies which are responsible for road deaths when it comes to Goa. How alignments of National Expressways through villages depend on whose real estate prices need to be appreciated and whose economic fortunes have to be destroyed will go unreported. The story will not narrate how the locating of traffic lights, speed limits, speed breakers and zebra crossings are not necessarily governed by specifications laid down in the relevant IRC code, but determined more by the dictates of vote banks. The political tactic of taking up piecemeal expansion of roads to minimise public outcry and the divide to diffuse any opposition will never get questioned in the road safety of social entrepreneurs as it will put them out of business.
The Road Safety Week in Goa is the story of the right hand not knowing what the left hand is doing. It’s again those piecemeal initiatives by individual agencies rather than a collective program of the multiple agencies which exercise their authority on the road space. Like any smart city or tourism planning initiative undertaken by government agencies in Goa, road safety initiatives too have miserably failed to involve all the stakeholders. It has remained an exclusive club of a few experts imposing their ideas with a top-down approach. This only results in public resistance to compliance or an unconvinced surrender to imposition. Is it not high time for Goa to conduct a social audit on roads during a Road Safety Week in order to highlight the physical condition and quality of the district, city and village roads?
https://www.heraldgoa.in/Opinions/Opinions/Goa%E2%80%99s-Roads-A-story-of-hypocrisy-and-corruption/139153.html
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