Vidhi Doshi in Mumbai
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| The tangled wreckage of a minibus is pictured as onlookers gather at an accident scene in Chelakkad, in the Malappuram district of India’s Kerala state. Photograph: Strdel/AFP/Getty Images |
Helping a road accident victim in India can cause legal hassles, police questioning and long hospital waits. A supreme court ruling could bring much needed change
By the time Shrijith Ravindran arrived, a crowd had gathered around the injured man. Someone had moved his body to the side of the road, and witnesses had started taking photos and videos. But nobody was helping Dilip Khairnar, who by now, had blood pouring out of his ears. Ravindran, on his way home from the Malaka Spice restaurant where he works, pushed through the scrum to see what was happening. “He was in a horrible state. I asked the people there, ‘Has someone called an ambulance?’ They said, ‘Yes, but he’s been here for quite a while and the ambulance hasn’t come yet’,” Ravindran recalls, now six months after the incident.
Ravindran knew time was running out. “I asked someone to help me put him in my car, and I drove him to the nearest hospital.”
That night at around 11pm, Khairnar became yet another statistic: one of 140,000 people who die every year on India’s chaotic roads. According to India’s Law Commission, 50% of these deaths could have been avoided if victims had received medical attention within the first 60 minutes after the accident occurs. But according to a survey by the SaveLife Foundation, a road safety advocacy group, 74% of bystanders would not assist a road accident victim, with the majority citing legal hassles, repeated police questioning and long waits at hospitals as reasons for not wanting to get involved.
Ravindran was an exception. “There is this fear,” he says. “It’s not that people don’t want to help, but they’re thinking, will I get stuck? What if the police hassle me? Or what happens if I get to the hospital and can’t track down his relatives? Who’s responsibility is he then? What if he dies in my car? Then what do I do with the body if the hospital say he’s your responsibility? There are no proper rules, and usually you get stuck in all this if you try to help, so people don’t want to get entangled.”
In March, India’s supreme court passed a landmark ruling, introducing a “good samaritan” law, which gives legal protection to bystanders who help road accident victims, instructing police and hospitals not to hassle people providing emergency help in times of distress.
For Ravindran, however, the law came too late. He spent hours waiting in hospital before Khairnar’s family was found, filling out forms and police reports. “At one point I literally had to carry his body from the emergency room to the X-ray theatre, and no one would help me hold the stretcher. You can understand why nobody wants to help when the system itself is so bad,” he says.
Piyush Tewari, founder of SaveLife, says good samaritans are often called to police stations for questioning, forced to give witness statements in court, detained for hours in hospital and obliged to pay medical bills. “There are countless cases where bystanders have intervened and saved lives in incidents related to building collapse, bomb blasts, fire, train accidents. However, the same bystanders who become rescuers in other situations are reluctant to come forward to help road accident victims,” he says.
Tewari’s interest in road safety started after his 15-year old cousin was killed in an accident. “For 45 minutes he lay unattended on the road, bleeding profusely. People stopped to see but no one came forward to help, and he bled to death. This incident left me devastated and was also a triggering point for me to start researching the issue of road safety and emergency care in India,” he says.
Tewari took a sabbatical from work and travelled around the country meeting families of road accident victims, lawyers, police, doctors and road safety activists. His efforts led to a huge awareness campaign, including questions being raised in parliament, a petition signed by 100,000 people delivered to the health minister, and discussions of good samaritan laws on talk shows.
With little political will to tackle the issue of road deaths – a complicated problem that could take years to resolve – advocacy and public pressure has been crucial to drawing attention to cases like Ravindran’s.
Now, for the good samaritan law to be enforced, India’s federal system requires each of the country’s 29 states and seven union territories to follow the supreme court’s directive to pass their own laws.
Last month, the state cabinet of the southern state of Karnataka became the first in the country to approve the court’s ruling, months after a horrific death in the state capital, Bengaluru, of a 24-year old man who was run over by a lorry and who died before emergency services reached him.
Karnataka’s government will now ask the state’s legislative assembly to ratify their bill. If ratified, it would set a precedent for other states to follow.
According to Suzanne Turner, who authored a study on good samaritan laws worldwide, the new law is the “first step” to reducing road deaths and improving emergency medical care. She says the legal reform is “unprecedented”, and hopes other states will follow Karnataka’s lead.
Ravindran also sees the law as a step in the right direction, but says reducing road deaths requires political will. “There are still so many big questions that are unanswered, such as who will assume the costs if the victim is taken to a private hospital? What happens if the victim’s family members can’t be found? The truth is, we don’t have the answers,” he says.
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