The toll in the Kurla bus crash in Mumbai on Monday has now climbed to seven. At least 42 people were injured, many of them critically, after a BEST bus plying on Route 332 ploughed through vehicles and pedestrians on the busy road.
The bus had barrelled on for several hundred metres after it first hit a vehicle, stopping only when it rammed into the wall of a housing complex, say reports. The driver has reportedly said that he was unfamiliar with the vehicle’s automatic system. Nonetheless, the police have taken him into custody to ascertain if he was adequately trained to drive heavy commercial vehicles or was intoxicated.
Even though the reasons for the bus driver’s actions are not immediately certain, the factors that contributed to the large number of fatalities are evident to anyone who uses Mumbai’s chaotic streets.
The 332, connecting Kurla and Andheri stations, is one of Mumbai’s busiest, congested routes. For instance, the leg between Kurla station and Sakinaka is under 5 km but takes an average of 25 minutes – even out of peak hours.
This is not a problem just in this part of the city.
Mumbai’s arterial roads resemble large, contiguous construction sites. Mega-infrastructure initiatives, such as the metro expansion and the coastal road project, have disrupted traffic across neighbourhoods.
Though administrators claim that these transport projects will eventually do much to alleviate Mumbai’s problems, that may not actually be the case.
The road projects largely cater to vehicle owners and users, even though they form only 15% of daily commuters. Metro networks, though fast and convenient, disproportionately eat into the incomes of low- and middle-income residents and have consistently fallen short of ridership estimates.
Mumbai has long had excellent affordable public transport models in the form of its suburban train system and BEST bus services. However, these have not been expanded and upgraded to meet the needs of daily commuters. At peak, the trains carry 2.6 times more passengers than they are designed to, packing between 14 and 16 riders into each square metre of space.
Though 51% of Mumbai’s commuters walk to their destinations, their journeys are far from pleasant. Footpaths are absent in many parts of the city and where they exist, they are badly built, encroached upon and often used by two-wheeler drivers.
As a consequence, pedestrians are forced to negotiate the congested streets in a city that has 2,300 vehicles for every kilometre of road space.
The roads themselves are often of poor quality. Until October, the Brihanmumbai Municipal Corporation had concretised only 9% of 600 km of the city’s roads, even though the work order for this project was issued 16 months ago, reported The Indian Express.
Such large-scale construction and repair work leads to closures, diversions and increased travel time. Though these poor circumstances make roads unsafe, among the key issues contributing towards the lack of road safety in Mumbai appear to be economic precarity and visibly diminished state capacity to enforce traffic rules.
Drivers working for cab aggregators and delivery services are locked in a perennial high-stakes race against time. When earnings and incentives depend entirely on meeting milestones, traffic rules amount to little. Short promised delivery times and lower ratings and penalties for delays create an environment where drivers must choose between personal safety, traffic rules and economic survival. The rise in the prices of basic commodities means gig workers have to drive longer to keep their earnings from falling.
The precarity introduced by the BEST in its own system also deserves scrutiny. In 2018, with the aim of cutting costs, the BEST started to privatise parts of its services. Hundreds of BEST buses on Mumbai roads are now run on a “wet-lease” basis. This essentially means that private companies own, maintain and operate buses under a revenue-sharing arrangement with the BEST.
Activists believe BEST provides an essential service and should not make decisions based purely on financial interests. Amid this cost-cutting arrangement, where the number of companies being contacted fluctuates, commuters complain of disappearing routes, lower frequency and poor service.
The bus on the 332 route that crashed on December 10 was also owned and operated by a private contractor. The Hindustan Times reported that the driver had not received adequate training before moving from a six-metre manual transmission bus – which he had been driving until December 1 – to a 12-metre automatic transmission bus.
Instead of the six-week training mandated by the BEST’s standard operating procedure, the driver got just three days on the new type of bus. When the wet-leasing arrangement was proposed, activists had identified driver training as one of the key vulnerabilities.
Commuting by road in Mumbai gives the sense that the traffic rules are implemented only selectively. The prime objective of traffic management in the city seems to be to keep the vehicles moving through various bottlenecks instead of strictly enforcing the rules.
This results in drivers disregarding traffic signals, pedestrian crossings, and, most worryingly, driving on the wrong side of the road. According to a state government document in 2023-’24, the Greater Mumbai region recorded 2,533 accidents resulting in 283 fatalities and 2,617 people injured.
Citizens have frequently highlighted these problems and voiced their concerns about the lack of road safety. The city’s newspapers have also reported on this for a long time now.
It is not difficult to see that tragedies like the ones caused by the bus on BEST Route 332 are not entirely accidental.
Faiz Ullah researches and writes on media, labour and digital cultures
Limited-time offer: Big stories, small price. Keep independent media alive. Become a Scroll member today!
Our journalism is for everyone. But you can get special privileges by buying an annual Scroll Membership. Sign up today!