HYDERABAD: 18-year-old A Ganesh Kumar, a student from Khammam, died after a drunk trader’s car mowed him down while he was crossing the road recently. Should innocent people pay with their lives for somebody’s irresponsible behaviour? Going by the state of affairs, it seems inevitable.If one is caught driving in an inebriated condition, the traffic police detain the vehicle, slap a penalty not exceeding Rs 3,000 and book a case against the accused under Section 185 of the Motor Vehicles Act. If opinions of youngsters are anything to go by, the law, applied as of now, is no deterrent.“The basic problem lies in the fact that the consequence of such actions is not severe enough and we all know it. For a person, who can spend lakhs on an automobile and spend another Rs 5,000 on drinks, a Rs 2,000 fine is nothing. The police should cancel driving licences, only then things will work,” opines Vikas Borwankar, an employee at JP Morgan Chase.This year, between January and April, over 161 people died in road accidents and over 827 people suffered major and minor injuries. Not all of these accidents were caused due to drunken driving but on an average, annually, 40 per cent of the accidents are due to drunken driving. Besides drunken driving, these days, drug driving too seems to be happening. People driving under the influence of drugs, be it ganja or cocaine, easily escape the usual tests conducted by the police. The hand-held alcohol breath analyzers used by the traffic police to curb drunken driving only detect alcohol content. “Whenever we conduct a test, it is to detect intoxication of alcohol in the trachea. We do not have equipment that can detect drug content in the body,” admits PVS Ramakrishna, DCP, Traffic.Another senior police officer explains, “the equipment to detect drug content in the body is not being used anywhere in India. Some police departments in other countries do have the equipment. The technology used in these devices is very advanced and very expensive. The equipment can even detect the level of drug content, which only a few police departments have access to, till now. We do not have it in the country yet.”With easy availability of cocaine, marijuana and other harmful drugs, are people drifting from alcohol to get away from the test? “Yes, of course,” reveals Amogh G, a techie. “I have friends who smoke up and drive back home. Many a time, they just escaped from the test. It is extremely irresponsible of them to do so,” he says. Subhojit Das, a software professional, however, disagrees. “We don’t drive after smoking up. It is an impossible feat, given the high you get. It is usually about crashing out at a friend’s place till we are out of it. No one in their sane mind will drive after doping.” He points out that a person tends to see colours differently after they have done acid.
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