Not so fast

On the face of it, the ministry of roads and highways' proposal to amend the Motor Vehicles Act to increase the permissible highway speed for most kinds of vehicles is an idea whose time has come. After all, in a large number of places, the roads are better, and certainly the cars are a lot fitter. Increasing the permissible speeds would reduce the travel time considerably and would result in productivity gains. But increasing the legal speed limit on highways is just a part of the solution. For, the extent of the gains would depend upon not just the speed attained in stretches of highways, but on the average speed of a journey, which gets sharply reduced within city limits, or by the waiting required at state borders. Also, while the positives for those who like driving fast are obvious, the potential economic gain may not be as large as initially thought, given that the proposal does not envisage raising the speed limits for either trucks or buses.

The huge cost angle also needs to be kept in mind. India loses about 100,000 lives each year to road deaths and another million people are believed to be involved in accidents that are not fatal but add to the over Rs 55,000 crore a year social costs of such accidents. Indeed, India has among the highest fatalities in the world. According to the Tenth Five-Year Plan document, India has just 4.3 per cent of the world's motor vehicle population but a 13 per cent share in the road fatalities. On average, one in five persons involved in road accidents dies in India as compared to around one in 50 in developed countries. It is true the roads are better and the cars stronger, but what matters while fixing speed limits is the impact of an accident on pedestrians. Most countries that have higher speed limits than India's do not have such mixed usage patterns as India has. So, setting the speeding limit, per force, has to be done keeping this in mind. It is true that this does not apply to access control expressways where there is no possibility of human or animal traffic getting in the way of cars, but it would be wise to restrict the easing of speed limits to such highways alone""the savings there, though, have to be discounted by the fact that such highways typically cost many times more than the conventional ones. Much of the famous Golden Quadrilateral programme, for instance, has highways that pass through villages and towns with nothing to prevent habitants from crossing the road at will. Nor is it certain that things are hunky dory on the access controlled highways either. In one such highway where the high speeds resulted in an unnaturally large number of pileups, a study showed there were design defects which were responsible. The study was buried and another commissioned which showed the design was all right! It's possible the first study got it wrong but the point is that the driving public was never made aware of this. Before the ministry moves on increasing speed limits, it needs to answer a lot of tough questions. In any case, the larger productivity gains for the economy will really accrue from getting trucks to move more than the 200 km a day, but this has more to do with factors other than just the permissible speed on the highways.