Potholes as death traps: Why should the civic body go scot-free?

A 21-year-old intern with an industrial house hits a pothole, fall off his bike and a truck coming from behind runs over him, crushing his head. He dies. It happened on the Western Express Highway on Wednesday.

Who is the guilty?

The police said the truck had a Gujarat registration. It may be hunted down, depending on the police commitment to the case and it could be treated as a hit-and-run case.

The young man was not at fault, unless he was driving rashly, probably what the truck driver maybe accused of. He was knocked down by a pothole.

Since the police cannot register a case against a truck but can against its driver, shouldn’t it naturally follow that because a case cannot be registered against a pothole, its owner be booked too?

The least one can say is that the pothole had a definite role—and thereby the pothole’s owner—had some culpability in the unnatural death of the young man, Jaideep Karveer. Why let the pothole owner off the hook by voicing a suspicion since there were no eyewitnesses?

The devil’s advocate construct could be that he did not hit a pothole to tumble. It is quite possible that when driving on a sieve-like, pothole-ridden road, he may have tried to weave around them and lost his balance? The pothole is central to his death.

He was also trying to avoid damage to his bike, his spine, fearing backache or spondylitis? And that these emerge on all roads, even new, after a few showers so routinely is why motorbike riders have to develop an uncanny dexterity.

An FIR against the pothole owner, common sense says, is warranted. In such accidents in the past in a metropolitan region of Mumbai, the causes that initiated the mishaps were treated as only incidental.

That’s bad. Very bad, indeed.

I don’t want to argue citing sections and sub-clauses of rules and laws, but here, the owner, Municipal Corporation of Greater Mumbai, has to be in the dock. It has much to answer for, if the police persist as to why the pothole was where it had no business to be.

A week earlier, Umesh Shinde, a 28-year-old engineer died an unnatural death when he hit a pothole on a flyover, was flung off his bike, and hit a lamppost. The Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation for whom the flyover in Malad was built by a contractor, accepted culpability and asked the builder, to pay up Rs 5 lakh.

The Times of India quoted the contractor, J Kumar Infra Projects thus: The “defect liability period” is mostly for structural or major faults and not for potholes that “crop up despite routine asphalt maintenance or carpeting”.

So MSRDC and the contractors are on different pages.

The culpability of the pothole, however, was conceded when on the very next day, the guilty one was filled up, with perhaps a predictable short life – if a road built and maintained as per standards only on paper can’t last, and one wonders how long this patch-up would stay.

What is significant is that the owner of the flyover accepted some liability, even if only vicarious. The police could treat this as a precedent and push the case further. But why would the police do this? Because, traffic rules are set and enforced to avoid accidents and anything that promote accidents is a factor it definitely ought to deal with.

They stop you from speeding because speeding could cause you or another innocent and rightful user of the roads injury or cost a life or two. That way, anything – poor roads, poor lighting, footpaths - should come under its scanner because they have everything to do with accidents. They have to be corrected. That is by first establishing criminal liability.

If the civic bodies which own the roads and use contractors to build and maintain them, it devolves on them to ensure they are properly built and maintained. Anything less constitutes negligence. They need to be reminded that the traffic police cannot just erect a traffic signal or even decide on whether a road should be one-way or not without the civic bodies’ consent.

Also there’s the issue of connivance. It cannot be that a city like Mumbai which dreamt of becoming another Shanghai or Singapore is so befuddled that it cannot ensure a pothole-free road. It is laughable that fines on supervisors, threats of blacklisting and claims of trying new technology are rotted out when all the road-users get is only bad roads.

Logically, the civic bodies too have their role to play but don’t, apart from being diligent facilitators of potholes because they allow substandard material, the work, their supervision and maintenance, in preventing such pathetic apologies for roads. This is true of all civic bodies—perhaps a few rare exceptions?—across the country.

Imagine what could happen to the civic bodies which do not deliver quality if the law of torts were put to use for seeking and securing damages, even for a broken fork of a bike, the wrecked shock-absorbers of a car, medical bills for backaches. Given the number of potholes in any city, one could bleed the civic bodies white by claims.

For that, cities would need two kinds of people. One, the resolute citizen who does not accept nonsense and excuses and badgers the civic bodies, and two, a new breed of lawyers who, with full knowledge of the law of torts, emerge as the pothole chasers, like the Americans say they have, the ambulance chasers who work on insurance claims.

Also imagine the immense trust-deficit that can emerge between the network of rascals – the grabbing politicians and the officialdom on one hand, and the contractors on the other. The former can’t be asking for grease money and allow in return shoddy roads, and yet ask the contractors to pay, as MSRDC has.

All that is needed is a simple Right to Information application, seeking information on, specifications in the tender, the name of the contractor, the cost awarded by the civic body, the time and cost overruns, the identities of the officials who inspected the road when being laid or re-laid, the names of the members of standing committees which approved the contracts, and the subsequent expenses for filling potholes.

The additional information to be sought would have to include who spent on refilling the potholes – the civic body or the contractor. And penalties, if any, imposed. All these have to be specific to roads, appropriately identified to avoid any confusion which the civic bodies can use to obfuscate matters.

They can be useful for both the hungry media’s consumption and possibly, a suit in the Consumer Court. One wouldn’t even need a lawyer.

If this were to happen, things could change.