Fixing India’s Car Crash Capital

The Documentary Podcast

BBC

Society & Culture, Documentary, Personal Journals

4.3 • 2.6K Ratings

🗓️ 15 September 2016

⏱️ 27 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

India has some of the world's most dangerous roads. The government says almost 150,000 people died on them last year. Nowhere saw more crashes than the booming city of Mumbai. The carnage is relentless, affecting people at every level of society. Neal Razzell meets the Mumbaikers who are saying, enough: a vegetable seller who fills potholes in his spare time after his son died in one; a neurosurgeon whose experience treating victims has led him to try to build trauma centres along one of the worst roads; and an unlikely combination of engineers, activists and police officers with an ambitious plan to bring the number of deaths on a notorious expressway down to zero. It’s hoped there will be lessons in Mumbai for all of India. The country is in the midst of an historic road-building push. By 2020, Prime Minister Modi wants to pave a distance greater than the circumference of the earth.

Produced by Michael Gallagher

Transcript

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0:00.0	This is a BBC podcast.
0:02.4	You can get all our podcasts and our terms of use
0:04.9	at BBCworldservice.com slash podcasts.
0:18.3	Welcome to assignment on the BBC World Service. This week we're in India and a warning. There's some disturbing content from the outset. We're on a rain-soaked expressway outside Mumbai.
0:27.0	Well we stopped by the highway now and there is a single car or what used to be a car it is just a mangled pile of metal. A rear wheel is ripped off.
0:39.1	The seat belts are hanging out. It's hard to believe that anybody could have survived from this and I'm not sure if anyone did.
0:46.0	Robbie, how many people were in this car?
0:48.0	I think there are about five people in the car.
0:51.0	Four of them were fatal and one of them is seriously injured and admitted in the hospital.
0:58.0	Crash investigator Ravi Shankar says the driver was speeding when he lost control and hit the pillar of a bridge a few steps away.
1:05.0	How fast do you think they were going?
1:07.0	Looking at the damage we can estimate that it's going to be over 120 kilometers per hour.
1:11.0	And if you see inside on the roof you can see that there is a lot of tissue, a little bit of blood.
1:19.7	When you say tissue, that's human remains.
1:23.3	Yes.
1:24.3	We can also see there are a lot of shoes, slippers, what the occupants were wearing.
1:28.6	Gosh, their items are still there.
1:30.1	Yes.
1:31.8	Usually a car does not stay on the scene for a long time,
1:35.0	but in this case, probably the family is taking care of the last rites and rituals,
1:40.0	and nobody has time right now to take the car back.
1:43.0	Four people died in this crash.
	...

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