GUWAHATI: A scooter is about as ordinary as it gets on an Assam road. On Friday, September 18, at Madhyam Khand in North Guwahati, two of them collided head-on, and a young woman did not survive.
It was one of two separate accidents in and around the city that day. Together they left one person dead and four seriously injured.
The victim was Pallavi Newar, who lived in Rajaduar. Three others on the two scooters were badly hurt and taken to Narayana Hospital. What put the two machines on a collision course is still unclear, and until someone with the facts says otherwise, it would be wrong to guess.
Head-on collisions leave very little room to react. Often there’s no time to brake and nowhere to swerve. It all happens in a second, and the consequences can last a lifetime.
The second accident, at the Lokhra flyover the same day, involved three vehicles and a chain reaction. Preliminary information suggests a commercial goods vehicle was on the wrong side of the road when it hit a passenger car. The impact then pushed the car into a motorcycle, and the motorcycle rider was seriously injured. Personnel from Basistha Police Station arrived and joined the rescue effort.
Wrong-side driving is something most of us have seen on our own commutes. It looks like a shortcut. It behaves like a gamble, and it’s rarely the gambler who pays the full price. On a flyover, where traffic settles into a rhythm and there is little space to dodge, a vehicle coming the wrong way gives everyone else almost no warning. To be fair, the wrong-side detail is early information, not a finding. The call belongs to the investigation, and it should be made carefully.
Put the two accidents side by side and something stands out. The five people killed or seriously hurt were all on two wheels, as far as the early reports go. Scooters and motorcycles are how a huge number of people in this region get around, to work, to college, to the market, and they are also the least forgiving vehicles when something goes wrong. There is no airbag on a scooter. There is no crumple zone on a motorcycle.
Early reports, as carried by India Today NE, leave plenty unanswered. How each crash happened, and why, is still to be pieced together. It was not immediately clear whether the driver of the goods vehicle had been questioned, or how the injured were faring beyond early word that their injuries were serious.
It’s easy to read a story like this in ten seconds and scroll on. Two crashes, a few place names, a hospital, a police station. But Pallavi Newar is more than a name in a report. She was a young life cut short on an ordinary road, and four others were left with serious injuries.
Nobody leaves home planning to become a headline. That is exactly why the rules of the road exist, and why breaking them to save a few minutes is the most expensive trade a driver can make. Keep to your side of the road. Let the person coming the other way get home too.
