Avoid Being in Road Accidents at all Costs
Measures to mitigate the risk of a road accident and of injury or death if you do get into one.
The Book
Bhavin Jankharia
The Detailed 15-Point Guide to Live Long, Healthy
Bhavin Jankharia
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What is the point of being physically active, eating sensibly, sleeping well, taking vaccines, not smoking, etc, if you get knocked down while walking or are involved in a car accident while driving or being driven and sustain a grievous injury or die?
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways [1] has just released the 2022 road accident numbers. India had 4.6L (461,312) accidents causing 4.4L (443,366) injuries in 2022, with 1.5L (155,781) deaths.
While the rate of injuries is low compared to the rest of the world (25 per 100,000 population compared to 590/100,000 in the United States), given that almost 33% of people involved in accidents in 2022 died and another 31% had grievous injury that needed hospitalization, India tops the list of road accident deaths in the world, though at 9.5/100,000, it still has a lower rate per 100,000 population (simply because we are 1.4 billion people) than the US, which has a death rate from road accidents of 11.7/100,000, Venezuela being the highest at 39.4/100,000.
This makes road accidents the 9th or 10th biggest killer in India, higher than deaths from any individual cancer. For e.g. breast cancer deaths were around 90,000 as of 2020.
Since road accidents are such a common cause of death, we need to know what to do to mitigate the risk of an accident and if we do get into one, to reduce the risk of injury and death. For that we need to know what causes accidents, injuries and deaths in India.