Let,s come to gether as the youth of this country to make a difference. As the comments come in, analysis and post-mortem go on I would like to take the opportunity to bring to light some of our fundamental highway, transportation, road safety and engineering flaws and how the capitalists, politicians, policy makers and also all of us as end customers have made something by risking our own and others life and property.
To start with the licence raj in India didn’t allow other manufacturers to come in and allow us the benefit of using best of the breed global technology starting from HCV’s, LCV.s , Passenger Cars and other surface (Road) transportation means and appropriate infrastructure.
A few individuals and companies heavily benefited and are still continuing to reap the benefits of a price sensitive customer and churn out products of poor quality and blaming the end customer.The result being a poorly engineered product at a low cost. This is seen across every item/commodity that we use even in daily life and that has led to a poor quality of living standards in our country.
Imagine if we started selling high quality stuff across all the products/services you use in daily life. Obvious effect will be that many people would not be able to afford it immediately. To make something of such high quality you will have to be appropriately qualified and thus get paid well eventually allowing you to afford the products/services. It may be un practical to begin with but we can already see the change from Branded Garments, Volvo Buses, Multiplexes to Organic food products.
I had some interesting company recently on a bus ride from Coimbatore to Chennai and the man next to my seat was a retired design engineer from a large commercial vehicle maker. Some of the revelations he made was really scary and I began to urge him to tell me more. After almost 3 hours of digging and his cooperation there were many a facts he share with me.
All us know that we have been riding on tops of trucks for many years built like a bus and if you imagine is no different for the manufacturer between people and goods and that to many years of unquestioned monopoly.
In the CV segment driver safety and comfort were never the criteria and the race was on being priced lower and haul more for less fuel. It still remains the same today except that some of the foreign entrants are pushing local producers to wake up. We are still running BS-III CV's on BS-II fuel for no evident benifits and increasing the air pollutants.
Trucks are still the foremost reason for accidents on Indian roads and have you wondered why?.. I am a bit tired from my return road trip from Chennai and travelling again to Coimbatore today.
I will write more as soon as find time and request all of you to put in your inputs, suggestions and recommendations from across the country so that we can make a collective representation to the new ministry of transportation and put pressure to have more measures for road safety and hopefully pass laws in this direction across the system.
Let’s take all our road experiences to a new level and take the vow to do all that is possible as an individual to make the roads safer for you and your family and all the fellow road users. Join in the road user’s brotherhood and let this forum get the message pan India and start a revolution.
Jai Hind.
Mike |