As prosperity clogs roads, India's drivers yield to no one

From his tiny Maruti sedan, Shrichand Indora is trying to change Indian driving habits, one student at a time.

As a city of apparent race-car drivers swirls around him, Mr. Indora calmly teaches a first-time driver - a housekeeper named Minu Yacub - the proper etiquette of the road.

"Look at this fellow, this is wrong," he says, momentarily taking the wheel from the frazzled Mrs. Yacub. Her eyes still bugged out from her first near-accident, Yacub takes the wheel back reluctantly. "We have the right of way," says Indora. "But not everybody goes to driving school, they don't know the rules. And they just don't have patience."

What Indora knows but doesn't say is that driving is getting more dangerous. According to a World Health Organization report released earlier this month, more than 3,200 people around the world die each day from traffic accidents. Without drastic measures now, traffic deaths could increase by a further 65 percent, becoming the third-leading cause of death by 2020, ahead of tuberculosis, war, and HIV.

The problem is projected to hit developing countries the hardest, and particularly fast-growing, densely populated countries like India. Here, prosperity is a two-edged sword, bringing more personally owned automobiles, scooters, or motorcycles, but also more fatalities.

It's a problem Rajeev Talwar, Delhi's commissioner for transport, knows well.

"Delhi has more vehicles than Mumbai [Bombay], Calcutta, and Chennai combined, but it has more deaths, too," he says, noting that Delhi has more than 1,700 traffic deaths per year, an average of five per day. "We definitely need to take strong measures, we can't just regulate this and say we won't let the number of vehicles increase. We need to provide better roads and better movement of traffic. And people need to learn to obey the laws."

But the problem of fatal road accidents is clearly a worldwide phenomenon, as much a product of a globalized spirit of impatience as of any other factor. In the US, for instance, 4,808 pedestrians were killed and 71,000 injured in 2002, the last year for which figures are available from the US Department of Transportation. Most pedestrian fatalities occurred in urban areas, and the largest percentage of pedestrians, 23 percent, were children ages 5 to 9.

"We need a sustained effort to change behavior" to reduce the toll of deaths, said Mirta Roses, director of the Pan American Health Organization, speaking at a recent event in Washington. "We are really concerned about problems like this one, which is largely preventable."

Worldwide, the cost of traffic deaths is already steep. With 1.2 million people dying from traffic accidents each year (and another 50 million injured), road accidents cost nearly $518 billion per year.

For lower- and middle-income countries, the economic toll can be especially harsh. The economic cost of road accidents in poorer countries amounts to nearly $65 billion per year, more than these countries receive in development assistance.

Solving the problem of traffic congestion, of course, will require even more money to build more and more roads.

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