Killer potholes of India: Civic bodies should have to pay up for the deaths they cause

If a doctor can face legal action for malpractice or negligence, and a manufacturer of a product be held liable for its poor performance, why can’t civic bodies be held responsible for road accidents that occur due to their negligence? Priti Prasad of Ambarnath (in Mumbai’s metropolitan region) and Om Prakash of Bengaluru have been treated as culprits instead of victims despite one having lost a mother the other his wife. Both were riding their respective two-wheelers with a person riding pillion. And both crashed because of potholes on the road. [caption id=“attachment_2444760” align=“alignleft” width=“380”] Representational image. AFP[/caption] The law should have helped the survivors of the crash by punishing the culprits. But in both cases, the police went after the wrong person. Who then are the real culprits? The civic authorities whose job is to maintain the roads and the contractors who laid the roads. In both cases, they obviously fell short. Instead those who were riding the vehicles have been faulted and booked. A report in The Times of India said that the Bengaluru Police apparently recognised the contribution of the civic body to the incident. Nevertheless, the case continues and they want to know if Prakash was “speeding”. A lurching halt in a pothole, even at a prescribed speed, can unseat the rider. The pillion rider has no control and risks falling which could lead to injury and death. The question of speeding here is not as relevant as the criminal liability of not maintaing the roads. Priti Prasad tried to do the right thing by going to the heart of the matter. She argued that it wasn’t her driving at fault, but the pathetic condition of the road she was forced to use. The Ambernath police refused to register the FIR she was keen to file in order to target the contractor. She should ideally have listed the Ambernath civic body as well. Standards are often ignored when building roads and sometimes a bad job is done to ensure that subsequent pothole repair contracts are secured as well. Each monsoon is a trigger for renewed loot.  In Mumbai, the high court has had to weigh in on behalf of the citizens, asking the civic body to ensure good roads and keep them pothole-free. It hasn’t become reality yet though. Civic bodies, being impersonal and therefore insensitive, take these regular raps on the knuckle in their stride and provide sworn affidavits about how they will correct themselves.  The point is they don’t. Even Ganapati, the deity of Maharashtrian, has to worry if he can be brought in safely from the workshop and then taken for immersion without risking injury due to a pothole. Perhaps the law of torts, whereby they are required to pay for damaged caused, would be the best way to cure the civic bodies of their habitual neglect. Suppose Prakash and Prasad take on the civic bodies by making a demand using torts, and seeking a corrective for a wrong done, it would be a nice start. (You can read a simple explanation of the law of torts here.) The agencies, not exactly epitomes of efficiency, need to be taught a lesson. The two victims should perhaps take recourse to alternatives like consumer courts and fault them for bad service. Given the number of potholes, not just on any city’s badly-kept roads but on toll-funded highways as well, authorities will have to reckon with the loss of finances and the need to have a separate department to deal with the cases. But they have to get the message that the city is run on tax-payer’s money. It’s not enough to just have a civic body to provide employment to some and political opportunities to others. It would be a good idea if the accident laws were enabled to provide succour by levying the burden of compensation on the agencies. Normally the person responsible for a road accident pays through insurance companies. So why not the civic bodies given they are the principal cause of accidents?