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| Mobile Phones Menace | | | The mobile phones came into existence in India in the year 1994, with Modi Telstra’s MobileNet as the first mobile telephone service provider. In respect of Jammu and Kashmir (J&K), the mobile telephony was introduced by BSNL in the year 2003. Prior to it the only high end gadget in the telephone communication technology that we knew in India was the then relatively high range cord-less phone. I remember in early part of the year 1996, one of my colleagues was being operated upon for a renal procedure in the ‘Bombay Hospital’ in Bombay (now Mumbai). I had gone to see him in the hospital on the day of his surgery. The surgery unusually took more than five hours, while his brother (who was attending to him in the hospital) and I were waiting anxiously for the doctor or the theatre staff to come out and share with us the surgery update. It was understandably an agonizing wait for my colleague’s wife back home in Srinagar, as she was waiting endlessly for a telephone call from one of us present in the hospital. After my colleague was brought out of the operation theatre after the surgery, I telephoned my colleague’s wife and assured her that the surgery was successful and that her husband was in post-op & recuperating. Now the instrument from which I called the Srinagar landline of my colleague’s home from the hospital then was perhaps a 900MHz frequency cordless phone, which apparently had a range of a few hundred meters. The instrument belonged to my colleague’s brother’s Bombay friend, who had also joined the two of us in the hospital, as the surgery was going on. The point I am trying to make here is that life went on as usual then also when there were no mobile phones in India.
With the advent of mobile telephony, life has undisputedly become much easier. That said the mobile phone technology like any other technology has a negative flip side as well. Here we will talk only about the use of mobile phones during driving. Every year approximately 1.5 lakh people die on Indian roads and according to a report of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Govt of India, a total of 1997 road accidents occurred in 2021 due to the use of mobile phone by drivers while driving, which claimed 1040 lives. In J&K, 805 people died and 8372 were injured in 6092 road accidents during the year 2022. Not all these accidents in J&K occur due to use of mobile phones while driving but a significant percentage (about 31 % at the national level) of road accidents is largely attributable to the usage of mobile phones while driving. In Srinagar immediately after the launch of mobile telephones in the year 2003, a senior anesthetist of a leading private hospital of Srinagar lost his life due to distracted driving caused due to mobile phone use, when he was travelling from Anantnag to Srinagar on the national highway. At the other end of the spectrum, very recently in June, 2023, a senior officer in the J&K administration from Baramulla died along with his wife and son, when he was travelling in his private car from Jammu to Srinagar on the Mughal Road. His colleagues in the civil secretariat, Srinagar, quoting his family sources say that he was using his mobile phone while driving and lost control over the vehicle while navigating a sharp bend. His daughter who was also travelling in the ill-fated car was badly injured in the accident as the vehicle skidded into a deep ravine.
A very common sight on the Srinagar and Jammu cities roads in J&K as also the country side of the Union Territory (UT), I am assuming, is the drivers regardless of their age, gender and level of education, using mobile phones while driving. The worst part is that some drivers use their mobile phones for texting while driving. I might be wrong in my assessment but based on my almost daily observations, I reckon there are at least three drivers hypothetically in a bunch of every twenty drivers in the Srinagar and Jammu cities roads, who very negligently and illegally (if I may use the word) use mobile phones while driving. Civic sense is all about having consideration for fellow human beings, while living in a civilized society. How many of us follow the traffic signals religiously or how many of us let the elderly, the children, and the frail cross the road while we are driving? Let us admit it that we are highly un-civic on road; we lack compassion and generally have a tendency to flout the norms. What is the solution then? The solution is strict law enforcement, observance of traffic rules in letter & spirit and coming down heavily on all defaulters & traffic violators. And who shall enforce the rules? – The Law Enforcing Agencies. And are they empowered to do so?– Yes they are and they better be if they are not for the greater good of the people of the UT of J&K and the sooner they do it the better.
Here I am reminded of an episode that typifies strict law enforcement in the west. In USA during my Humphrey Fulbright Fellowship period, I was affiliated to the University of California, Davis. Davis is a small university town of the Sacramento county of California state and unlike Los Angeles and New York cities, which are considered worst traffic cities in the United States, Davis has almost negligible traffic. A large section of its population uses bicycles (bikes in local parlance) for intra city travel. Once I was riding my bike from downtown Davis to the University, I unfortunately didn’t notice the traffic signal and ended up crossing the road unknowingly jumping the red signal. A few hundred meters down the road, I was intercepted by a cop and was issued a stern warning to be careful in future, only on my truthful admission of not having noticed the red light at the signal. I had learnt the lesson of life – the hard way. Unfortunately we are a specie that comprehensively understands the language of law enforcement, when it is actually enforced in a hard way. From J&K’s standpoint, to cite an example in early 2000s, I remember a senior traffic cop in Jammu got a wild idea of enforcing the so called ‘Pollution Check’ on all vehicles in the Jammu city. The check entailed obtaining an ‘Emission Certificate’ from the J&K government’s Traffic Department’s registered ‘Pollution Centers’ for all vehicles. No ‘Pollution Certificate’ for any vehicle meant imposition of heavy fine by the traffic cops, who were on the prowl on almost all the Jammu city roads. For those few days or perhaps a week or two, there were long queues of vehicles (all types) lined up for hours together outside the very few ‘Pollution Centers’ of Jammu city, with the owners/drivers frantically seeking the pollution certificates to avoid being penalized by the traffic cops.
What prompted me to write this article was catching one of my own schoolmates on mobile phone while driving, a few days ago. Ironically my schoolmate is himself a senior police official and was in uniform then while perhaps driving his official vehicle. I was quick to post this episode on our ‘School Group’ calling upon my school mate to desist from using his mobile phone while driving. He was equally quick and candid in admitting his mistake and assured making immediate necessary amends. Through this article I would like to urge the Traffic Department of the UT of J&K to authorize its road personnel to enforce strict vigil and heavily penalize the traffic violators indiscriminately. One can see the traffic cops on the Srinagar and Jammu cities roads capturing on their smart phones the erring drivers during any acts of traffic violation. This drive however needs to be intensified vigorously, so as to rid the UT roads of the menace of mobile phones during driving. Adopting zero tolerance for use of mobile phones, while driving and producing challans against such defaulters, who not only endanger their own lives but also the lives of other drivers & the pedestrians would send a strong signal to the common masses that the Traffic Department of the UT of J&K is actually enforcing traffic rules with a stern hand. |
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