15 years on, SaveLIFE Foundation continues to save lives on Indian roads through new initiatives

In 2007, Piyush Tewari lost his 16-year-old cousin in a tragic accident in Kanpur. His cousin could have been saved if the ambulance had arrived on time or the bystanders helped transport him to emergency medical care.

Before the ‘Good Samaritan Law’ was effected in 2016, bystanders who came forward to help the injured would often be intimidated and harassed by procedural and legal hassles. 

However, this changed, courtesy of Tewari and SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF)—an NGO he founded in 2008—to tackle the issue of road safety.

Investing all his savings into SaveLIFE, he travelled for a year across India, meeting survivors, families, policemen, and doctors, and concluded that road accident deaths were preventable with the right systems and policies in place. 

He filed a Public Interest Litigation in the Supreme Court in 2012 requesting it to protect the ‘Good Samaritans’, who came forward to help the injured.

On March 30, 2016, the ‘Good Samaritan Law’ was enforced in the Indian Constitution via Article 141 and was later instituted by the Motor Vehicle Amendment Act in 2019.

Fifteen years hence, SLF continues its mission through various initiatives, including the implementation of the Zero Fatality Corridor, the Jeevan Raksha training programme, a partnership with All India Institute of Medical Sciences (AIIMS), Rishikesh, and its most recent project, Tactical Urbanism.

“Initially, our mandate was limited. In the process of getting the Good Samaritan Law in place, we started learning why crashes were happening in the first place. We also began to understand what needs to be done to prevent these and why a scientific approach was necessary,” Tewari tells SocialStory.

This led to the Zero Fatality Corridor initiative, which reduced the number of road crash fatalities on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, which recorded a peak of 151 deaths in 2016. 

Through data-driven research and forensic crash investigations, SLF determined why, where, when, and how crashes took place on the expressway. It implemented a 360-degree road safety solution across the 4Es of road safety—engineering, enforcement, emergency care, and engagement.

“Following this, there has been a 52% drop in fatalities on the Mumbai-Pune Express between 2016 and 2020. We are also learning how to institutionalise this change and ensure whatever works on the ground translates into policy and becomes part of the system,” he says. 

The initiative also achieved a 17% drop in road crash fatalities on the Satara-Kagal stretch of NH-48. Further, a 61% drop in deaths on the Old Mumbai-Pune Highway (NH-48) between 2018 and 2021. 

Focus on trauma care

Trauma care is not just about having an ambulance infrastructure in place. It begins much before the ambulance arrives and continues long after the injured has been transported to the hospital.

SLF signed an MoU with AIIMS Rishikesh earlier this year to advance road safety and emergency medical care in India. And Tewari believes India needs to have a nationwide universal access number for all emergencies.

“We view it as a chain of survival, where an injured person should firstly have access to care beginning with an easy-to-call number. We have 112, but the question is, have all states integrated their ambulance services, fire, and police departments with it? No!”

The next is bystander care, which is where the Good Samaritan Law kicks in, which requires a national-level programme to train people on how to handle the injured, revive them, and more.

“Ambulance care should also be standardised—the equipment in the vehicle, the quality of para-medical care, dissemination of the right information of the patient to the hospital, and protocols and structures hospitals have to care for the injured immediately. If the patient has to be transferred to other hospitals, what is the process, and so much more,” he adds. 

The partnership with AIIMS will also focus on knowledge—elements required in a hospital to save lives and advocacy. It also intends to undertake a forensic investigation of crashes through the study of injury reports to correlate what happened inside the vehicle with the injuries suffered by the occupants.

“This requires a significant amount of the study of biomechanics and various elements of trauma where AIIMS Rishikesh will support us with the knowledge to reconstruct crashes to get complete visibility and advocate for what is required to prevent such incidents injury from happening,” he says.

Engineering solution for road safety

In 2022, SLF launched the Tactical Urbanism (TU) trials as part of its Zero Fatality Corridor programme. It’s one of its many engineering solutions implemented on-ground to prevent loss of lives.

Intersections are identified and studied in terms of design, modal equity, and access.

Tewari elaborates, “We conduct about six to seven studies on a particular site to first understand what is going on. Our urban design team ensures any existing conflict is removed. Then they prepare a design for that particular intersection to ensure pedestrians have equal access, cyclists have a space, children can cross safely, spaces are available for public transport, vendors, and so on. This redesign is implemented using first soft measures.”

Instead of building a curbside, which involves a significant amount of time and money, cones are used to extend the curb or paint is used to extend it.

For example, if a cycle lane or a pedestrian walkway has to be created, then excess available space is acquired to ensure space is available for others. At the end of the trial, a report is prepared on how the redesign worked out, its impact, and how much space is created for the road-owning agency to make the design permanent.

So far, SLF has conducted 21 trials in four cities—Delhi, Pune, Bengaluru, and Nagpur—with excellent responses from local communities and the government.

It has trained over 25,000 policemen and other relevant individuals in life-saving skills nationally, over 45,000 people in life-saving and crash-prevention skills, and successfully transformed 19 high-fatality zones in three states into safe zones.

Nonetheless, the 15-year journey has not been without its challenges, says Tewari.

“Changing the narrative is a big challenge. How do you get people to understand there is a social equity issue here? The poor are the ones who are dying the most. Also, while we talk about the right to education, 40+ children and adolescents are killed every day, trying to navigate our roads and reach their educational institutions. About 93,000 women and children were killed in the last three years on the roads,” he says.

Also, other issues loom large—scrappage of vehicles destroying water and soil and speed impacting the environment. Tewari says a large part of the challenge is to get people to understand this is a multi-dimensional issue.

SLF plans to take the Zero Fatality Corridor programme to 100 highways and 100 districts and reduce fatalities to 50% nationally.