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Mission Road Safety
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PRIYADARSHINI SHARMA meets Upendra Narayan whose missionary zeal to promote road safety has met with a dull response
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While we are fortunate to have our own Rudi Guilianis, we are doubly fortunate to have our own social work zealots. Upendra Narayan is a lone ranger in the field of Traffic Management and Road safety. He is a voluntary worker in this area.
Disillusioned by the knot of beauracratic constraints and political maze, he is fighting a system where change is most needed but impossible to bring about.
A rally driver himself, he is an expert on the rule of the road and committed to the cause. It is this expertise on Road mechanics that he wants to put to good use.
Mr Narayan's several proposals to the Government of Kerala have drawn a blank. He laments that the Road Council should be an expert group but what exists today is someone preparing tea who has never tasted tea.
The thorough disregard for expert opinion is unfortunate. ''As bus owners are represented on the Road Committee they get round the law and the number of buses plying increases. But the poor motorist or two wheeler community has no representation.
``Motorists are gentlemen too, but are shabbily treated by the police.'' Coming down heavily on the Rites report on road improvement in Kerala, he explains a faulty road design of the Madhava Pharmacy Junction and Kaloor junction, he is enraged at the waste of public money.
Mr. Narayans belief is that accidents can be prevented and should not be passed off as fated. He has answers to road and vehicle related problems but is at pains that only World Bank project or ADB projects are valued.
According to him the new highway along the city is faulty, a charge agreed by the city police commissioner (No vehicle refuge, posing problem for multi axle vehicles). One wonders about the veracity of the charge that indigenous technology is ignored in favour of high sounding foreign technologies.
Mr Narayan's biggest contribution could be the indigenously made `diamond ceramic reflectors' with which he proposes to light the highways but is unsure about its acceptance by the authorities concerned.
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