For those of us abroad and even for those in Kerala, Onam is no longer an event which we look forward to in happiness and anticipation as we once did. Instead, it has become a time of introspection and guilt at the fact that we are no longer celebrating Onam the way we did, that we are not with our parents or relatives on this occasion, that in the rush to move up in life (or just to keep up), we neglect to maintain the social capital and so on. The thought of buying flowers from shop to create a pookalam fills me with disgust, the fact that we go to an Onam special in a hotel make me upset, the dozen filmy interviews where I listen to stupid people doling out pre-trained sentences about “their onam in childhood” makes me sick (Last year I listened to an eminent film actress telling how she used to collect “arippoovu” from the paddy field and how her neighbors used to be angry that their paddy field was destroyed by them because they collected all the “poovu” so there will be no more ari that year. Not sure if this idiot had seen arippoovu or worse a paddy field). The fact that I spend my time on Onam watching such idiotic programmes make me think.

I am not saying this to depress you but just to express my feelings on it. In many ways, this is probably a good thing. It really make you reflect on “Maveli Naadu Vannedum Kaalam” with happiness and nostalgia.

“TV um illa, hotelum illa”
Film starum illa, interviewum illa”

Ayyappa Panicker once told, when he came to IITK, that the construction of the Maveli song is unique in Malayalam. The word “vaneedum kalam” does not say if we are talking about past or future. “Vaneedum kalam” is amenable to past and future. So may be we shouldn’t let our hope down. The Maveli Kaalam is just coming up., Who knows, there is an election between this and next Onam and may be the time where there is no Kallam, Chathi, hartal or potholes in the highway is just around the corner…..

Tags: Social

Safety from Elephants

 Kottarathil Shankunni, author of Itheehya Mala had a pattern by which he will end a series of his stories with a story of one legendary elephant, before staring yet another series, ending with another elephant. So as a tribute to a great author who filled me with awe and helped me to expand my imagination, I thought I will end my first series of safety with an elephant story.

 “Kothukine kollan koodam veno?, my friend Advocate Anil Kumar often asks me as we discuss something or the other. As I was debating whether to write about safety from elephants, this was the question which crossed my mind. Should I include safety from elephants in my series and in a sense trivialize the series itself? Then what about stray dogs? Oh, by the way, what about snakes? Before long I could be asked to write about mosquito bites. Athu veno?

 Yet, safety from elephants is not a trivial issue in Kerala. Every other month you hear of a tamed elephant that has run amok, creating havoc in  temples or other public places, often leading to deaths. The issue was serious enough for Kalakaumudi magazine to run a cover story on this topic. In the specific case of elephants, for every individual that dies, there are at least one thousand who are traumatized by the experience, sometimes for a lifetime. My father went to Sabarimala in 1958 and was caught in a stampede, with my two sisters, in an incident where an elephant went amok. While he was not hurt, not even sure he even saw the elephant (kadanangunnathum kandu, kariyila ilakunnathum kandu, to paraphrase Harishree Ashokan), he never went back to Sabarimala, nor did he allow any of us to go for the next 25 years. So the impact is not trivial.

 Elephants are revered in Kerala and have been so for a few generations at least. Though elephants are seen in many parts of the world, they are not attempted to be tamed everywhere. Even when they are tamed, as in Thailand or Sri Lanka, they are not as much part of the cultural life as they are in Kerala. I am not sure if there are as many well known “legendary” elephants in any other part of the world, nor to my knowledge has a film been made about an elephant to immoralize the memory as we did for Guruvayoor Keshavan.

 I am a malayalee who grew up listening to stories from my father. Before I could read, I had already heard almost all of the stories in Itheehya mala and even more. This, as you know, included the story of all those famous elephants (Kotttarakkara Chandrasekharan, Thirunakkara Neelakandan etc). As a true blooded Malayalee, I think elephants are beautiful animals and I enjoy watching them and feeding them. My real reason for going to Guruvayoor always has been to watch the 50 + elephants in punnathur kotta. Last time I went, there was this cute (and naughty  I was told) baby elephant donated by Suresh Gopi there. I would like to take my son one day to show him all those elephants and narrate Itheehya Mala stories to him.

 So the point I am trying to make is that while I am as much as a malayalee as most of you are and I enjoy watching elephants as much as you do, when I put on a safety expert’s hat, I start to see things very differently. I see a completely unnecessary risk being created by the society and those of which are sustained on the basis of a few myths and misconceptions. Of the various preventable deaths that happen in our society, this is one that could be prevented 100% in our generation if only we take the right decisions now. Let me explain the issue from two angles: utility and cruelty.

 In my childhood, most elephants had dual use. All of them were trained to move timber around (thadi pidutham). I think this was the time when we had an extensive forest timber business (Koop). We did not have proper access roads or mechanization (such as fork lifts or JCBs). Therefore, having elephants were a must to sustain that industry. This is no longer the case. Firstly, we do not have an extensive forest timber concession business and, secondly, we now have equivalent mechanical equipment that can handle the tasks done by elephants. So, if we were to stop all our elephants from working on timber business tomorrow onwards, I don’t think the industry will come to a standstill. It may need an adjustment time but it is definitely does not mean the end.

 The alternative use of the elephant was for temple festivals (and occasionally for other events). This, unfortunately, is on the rise. The temple where I used to go had one elephant coming in for one day in my childhood. Now there are up to seven elephants coming for up to 5 days. With the number of temple renovations on the increase and temples getting increasingly financially stable, you can see the roaring business in parading elephants for temple festivals.

 As far as I know, there are three groups of people in Kerala who are deeply interested in the welfare of the elephants. Aana Premis (elephant lovers), Aaan Udamas (elephant owners) and then the Government. Within the Government, there is the Devaswam Department who probably want the elephant parade to continue, the Forest department which has the mandate to ensure the welfare of the elephants and the police department which, I would imagine, is dreading an elephant going mad any any given point of time.

 First, let me talk about the Aaana Premis.  Their passion for this animal has to be seen to be believed. They are totally romantic about the animal. They know which are the elephants on the top of the scale (based on documented elephant beauty parameters) and manage to track their favorite elephants at any point of time. Much before mobile phones became popular, in the early nineties, this group of “hard core aana premies”, one of them known to me, used to exchange postcards with each other updating the whereabouts of these elephants. These days, I am sure they continue the practice through the use of SMS. I often wonder if there will one day be an elephant reality show in Kerala to find out which is the most majestic animal of them all. I am sure there will be no shortage of audience or SMS votes.

 These “aana premies” not only enjoy watching them, but also keep a close eye on their welfare. They work collectively to introduce welfare schemes (how long an elephant should be allowed to work, walk, what time of the day they should be allowed to work, etc.). They also bring to public and authorities’ attention, any instance of abuse of the elephant and violation of these provisions. The selfless efforts by a number of these aana premies have often made me wonder.

 On the other hand, and often antagonistic to the aana premies, are the “aana udama” group. They have a more realistic approach to the animal because, at the end of the day, they have to implement all of the welfare measures that are proposed and also bear the brunt of the consequence in case the animal turns rogue. I had a very long chat with Advocate Arun Kumar, who is the president of the Kerala Aana Udama Sangham and has had elephants in his family as long as he can recall. I got a lot of interesting information from him regarding catching elephants, training them, and trading them. What really amazed me was that the current market price of a good elephant is about 1.3 crore. When I was young, the proverb in Malayalam was “aana jeevichalum chattalum pantheerayiram” and that referred to the market price of an elephant and the fact that you could sell its tusk and get the same price. This proverb is, however, no longer valid, for two reasons. Firstly, a live elephant is worth above one crore. A dead elephant is worth nothing (and lot of trouble) as tusks cannot be sold anymore. In conventional economics, the cash flow from the investment of elephants is not too robust. And then there is the prevailing danger of the investment and the cash flow vanishing in just one minute when the local authorities order a rampaging elephant to be shot! Yet the fact that there is still no shortage of people who are willing to own elephants is not a reflection of its economic return or speculative value but of the fact that most elephant owners are also aana premies themselves.

 If newspaper reports are to be believed, film star Jayaram, is both an aana premi and an aana udama. Incidentally, let me say as a way of “name dropping” that I am from the same hometown as Jayaram (Perumbavoor). Most people who enjoy watching elephants, and at least some people who own the elephants, actually have no idea how a wild elephant, which has the power to uproot a tree or overturn a truck is converted into a meek animal that obeys the command of a tiny individual armed with no more than a harmless stick. I think Jayaram probably would have a more balanced view on this because his ancestral house, in Kodanadu, is one of the few places in Kerala where wild elephants were tamed. I first went to visit Kodanadu in 1970, and catching and taming wild elephants were still practiced those days. Pits were set up along known routes of elephants and one or few elephants fell into the trap. The herd of elephants would then try their best to get their comrade out but upon receiving the news of elephant having fell into a pit, a team of expert mahouts, forest officials and experienced tamed elephants (thappana) went to the site to bring the elephant to Kodanad. The news of elephant having fell into pit was  newspaper item those days and we used to go immediately after a new elephant was brought. This new elephant will be brown and dusty, very agitated hitting on the wooden walls of the Kraal and was kept in solitary confinement. I am sure Jayaram would have seen this sight multiple times. I just noticed that Mathrubhumi carried a series of pictures of “aana pidutham” last week.

 Elephants are wild animals, very much like a lion or a tiger. They are not like cows or horses, which are domestic animals. So the elephants that we see in a “domesticated” are actually not domestic animals but are “tamed” animals. And there is a difference between the two. This animal is tamed by a combination of physical brutality and psychological maneuvering whereby it is made to realize that its only option to a safe life is obeying the commands of human beings. This, trust me, is not done by receiting “gajendra moksham” story into their ears or showing them “crocodile hunter” type of videos. This is done by being brutal in the early stages of the taming, whereby the animal is made to realize that: (a) human beings have in their command means for overwhelming and unlimited violence to control the elephant and (b) the human beings are prepared to use it when the animal does not obey commands. The second stage is one of psychological maneuvering whereby the animal is made to realize that its only hope to welfare (e.g., food, avoidance of torture, etc.) is to obey the commands of the human being. By combination of overwhelming violence and being the exclusive conduit of welfare, the trainer achieves mental superiority over this once powerful animal.

 I know it is not easy for us who have grown up hearing amazing stories of intelligence that the elephants exhibit and the fantastic myths about Guruvayoor Keshavan and other majestic elephants, to accept that each of our “mythological” and heroic elephants (and the majestic ones now) were tamed using the same process. Kottarathil Sankunni had a great way of mixing facts with fiction (a very enjoyable way I must admit), so I cannot vouch for the authenticity of every incident of intelligent behavior by those legendary elephants, but I can say for certain that none of those legendary elephants were tamed in any less violent or humane way. You could ask me how can these stories of love and loyalty of elephant be true if the root of it all is fear ?. Of course, it is well established that fear and love are not incompatible relationships. Even in human relationships you can see such situation where cruel husbands, mothers of fathers are both feared but also loved by their near ones.

 Regardless of whether elephants love human beings, I know for sure that there is a great amount of love for elephants in our society. However,  the question a true lover of elephants should ask is that “in balance, what is the love of the entire malayalees doing to the elephants?” If our love for tamed elephants is causing them great pain—to those new elephants as they are caught, tamed, and trained, so that they could be presented as “lovable” animals to us—is that love “true”. Think of yourself being captured by an alien of superior intelligence who communicates in a language that you don’t understand and travel in vehicles you are not familiar with and live in places that you have not heard of. Imagine what will happen if you are caught by them and tamed, by use of electric shocks or other pain inflicting methods to behave in a manner which they find “cute” or “adorable”, would you love the alien as an individual ?. Would we, as a race find the behavior of that other race acceptable?.

 Thinking about this article, I had a dream. In the dream, I am watching an elephant court in deep Kerala forest. All elephants, wild and tamed, present and previous, had assembled for an “aana vicharana”. In the dock are Veerappan, Kottarathil Shankunni, Jayaram, Guruvayoorappan, Ittan Mathukkutty,  Madampu Kunjukkuttan, and a guy who is the president of the Aana Premi Sangham, whom I could not recognize. Elephants are debating which of these have been “most harmful” to the elephant race. The jury was still out before I woke up so I didn’t get to know the judgment. But in my mind, they are all still in the dock.

As a safety expert, if I apply my mind, I can tell you a dozen or more ways of handling safety, related to elephants. But I am not going to do that. Instead, I would like to nominate anybody who goes anywhere near elephants, wild or tamed, for a Darwin Award.  This is a competition run mainly, but not exclusively, through the Internet. This is basically given out for somebody who does something so stupid that they either die or are made impotent. You can see the Darwin award nominations at http://www.darwinawards.com/. Their motto is honoring those who improve the species…by accidentally removing themselves from it! While tragic at individual levels, the 1000 people who run around the elephant which is going amok are all fit for nominations for the award. To save them by giving them safety leads wouldn’t be in line with my philosophy.

To me, the whole idea of brutalizing a wild animal, taming it, and then parading it so that you can adore it is totally not fit with the development of human civilization as we stand in 2010. I read last week that in Spain there is an active movement to ban bull fight. As you know, bullfight is the national sports of Spain and has a history that goes even beyond our craze with elephants, it plays bigger part of their psyche than ours, and it has more economic stake than ours. Catalonia has already passed laws to ban it. So to me, it is time the aana premies really started a movement to see the best way to ensure that no new elephant is caught, trained, or tamed. I think the new Government Laws support this. It is also time that we, as a society, started to think how we can seek forgiveness from these poor animals that we have brutalized and paraded only for our happiness. To me, giving them all a safe retirement life in a secured open area is the least we can do to atone our sins. I know there are scientific or practical constraints to this but if we, as a society, apply our mind to this, none of the challenges are insurmountable. May be we should give all these elephants to Guruvayoorappan as the last “devaprashnam” apparently said the Lord is happy to have as many elephants in his protection as possible. Experts can then decide how best to look after them and society (including Government) can decide how to compensate the elephant owners and involve the elephant lovers in their well being. If we start now, we can make the all elephant myths a true legend before 2100 AD.

A small sacrifice for kind man, a big gain for elephantkind.

From a safety experts point of view, then there will be no death on our streets from tamed elephants.

The next article on the safety series is now online

http://www.mathrubhumi.com/story.php?id=118546

Here is the English Version, titled “Your Job can Kill you”
I am finalizing my article on occupational safety when news comes in that three people die in an explosive factory in Alappuzha. If there is something more tragic than the news of death from explosive factory, it is the amazing regularity with which it happens in Kerala and yet we seems to learn nothing. In a way work in explosive factory is a task where you can imagine death is very close to you. But then that is not the only work situation where people die in Kerala every year. People die from more mundane tasks as cutting grass (bitten by snake). There are lot more work related deaths in Kerala such as;
Linemen being electrocuted
Construction workers falling down from scaffolding
Demolition workers buried under collapsing buildings
Well cleaners dying in old wells
Scavangers dying clearing septic tanks
Welders dying fixing petrol tanks

Even the above is not an exhaustive listing of occupational related deaths but you get the idea. But the good thing, if at all there could be good things about death, is that in all the above, you know it is the job which killed them. This means many things. Firstly, their families can claim and often get some compensation from their employers. Secondly, it can have a learning value for other people in the profession. Thirdly, in a perverse way, this will increase the remuneration for such services as market factor in that risk.

But there are other occupational hazards which kill people too often without them even knowing it. Exposure to asbestos can often lead to a deadly cancer which is always fatal. Exposure to small doses of hydrocarbons, as for petrol pump operators, can lead to cancer and other diseases. Working with lead acid batteries can lead to lead poisoning which can lead to deaths. In fact working with most of the chemicals, even in small quantities, can lead to severe health implications in their future. Unfortunately, the link between the hazard and the death is not very obvious like between the elephant killing its mahout. Consequently, people do not take evasive actions. They almost always receives no compensation (death often happens after they are retired and even if it happens while they are in service, the linkage is not obvious) and nobody learns anything. Also since the information is not in public domain, the market don’t pick up that information to factor into wages.
Death, of course, is the most tragic “wage” of an employment, but there are less severe complications too. People who sit for long time as part of their work or stand for long time or look into the computer screen for long time or use their hands in a repetitive manner (like computer operators) all acquire occupational related illnesses. In fact, if you analyse structurally, every job will have an occupational health consequence. Some are immediate and fatal while others are long term and less severe.
Our understanding of the issues surrounding occupational safety is not very well understood. Even when we are aware of the hazards, like electricity for electricians, we take the occupational hazards as somewhat inevitable, something which we signed into when we decided to accept the job. If you are afraid of rotten tomatoes don’t get into a mimicry artist’s profession. That seems to be our approach to occupational safety.
Yet, this need not be the case. While it may not be entirely possible to prevent the hazard, the possibility of the hazard doing any harm to the workers can be handled. In fact, in developed countries, it is mandatory that such hazards are looked into and any harm to the workmen are tried and prevented by design, training, procedures, and personal protective equipment. For example, in 99% of the situations, electrical hazards to the lineman can be eliminated by isolating the section where repair work is ongoing. The risk of the construction worker on scaffolding can be eliminated by having a lifeline attached to his body that will ensure he will not fall to his death even if he slips or the scaffold collapses.
So my article today is about how to identify the hazards you face in your workplace and how you can survive the hazards whether or not your employer has put in place measures of safety. In some situations, it can also help you to request your employer to put in place measures to protect your life, which is also in line with my basic philosophy of you taking more ownership for your own safety.
I had a personal lesson with occupational exposure and its consequences when my father was diagnosed with mesothelioma in 1997. Mesothelioma is a form of cancer that is caused exclusively by exposure to asbestos. This form of cancer is always fatal, spread is rapid from the time it is identified, is not amenable to treatment, and is extremely painful. My father, thankfully, died within one month of being diagnosed, without suffering excessively.
Reading about mesothelioma in those painful days, I understood that my father would have been exposed to asbestos at some point in his life. Being a scientist by nature, I did an entire life-cycle analysis of him to understand the exposure possibilities. As per what my father told me, my father was born in a house which had a roof thatched with straw. The school where he studied had tiled roof. In his working life, he never worked with asbestos. His company quarters had no asbestos roof and our house never had asbestos. Yet, scientifically, the link between mesothelioma and asbestos are apparently well established and beyond reasonable doubt. In the US, if you are diagnosed with mesothelioma, lawyer firms will take over your case, identify your point of exposure and get you the compensation. Big companies have been brought to penury due to their asbestos liability. A century-old ABB came close to liquidation due to entanglement in an asbestos litigation.
It was not my intention to find someone guilty or get compensation for my father’s death. Yet, pure professional curiosity made me to keep looking at the point of intersection of my father and asbestos. It took an earthquake in China and a visit to their major industrial area demolished by earthquake to get a glimpse of what is most likely the exposure point of asbestos for my father.
The sad fact is that asbestos, which is banned in much of developed world, is still not banned in Kerala. Worse, most people are not at all aware of its harmful effects. Asbestos is used in hundreds of situations starting from roofing sheets to thermal insulations. The asbestos fibres, when inhaled attach themselves to the lungs for a very long time. Even one time exposure to asbestos fibre can lead to mesothelioma 30 to 40 year after the explosure. The risk increases with the amount of exposure you have. So somebody who work regularly with asbestos have many more time the risk than somebody who just had one exposure. Incidentally, asbestos, embedded in cement (as we seen in roofing sheets or sewage pipes) is not harmful. The real culprit is the asbestos fibers, which are embedded in cement in the sheets and pipes. If the sheets or pipes is cut, drilled or broken, it rleases millions of minute, invisible, fibres and this is what will harm you. I come across asbestos in many countries where I work. I have a simple test to check if there is asbestos awareness in a country. I walk to the shopkeeper and ask if he could give me half the piece of an asbestos sheet. Anybody who willingly and voluntarily agrees to saw an asbestos sheet into two is totally ignorant of the consequence of asbestos. Try this test in your neighbourhood shop next time.
Asbestos has now been identified as a serious occupational hazard and there are extremely strict regulations on how it should be handled. When a building which has asbestos is to be demolished in the UK, it has to be first inspected by a trained asbestos specialist, the house (and often the surrounding) is isolated. Neighbours are given notice of the operation. The sheets are made wet by spraying water. People use special suits, including disposable coveralls and masks. The collected sheets are put into specially made and marked bags, which are then enclosed in another bag. The material is then transported to specially designated disposal sites. Think what you did with asbestos last time you had to deal with it ?
It is not possible for me to list in a brief article every possible hazard associated with every possible job that we have in Kerala. However, what I will try to do is to give you a general approach to how you can look into your own job, identify the hazards, take due precautions (including insurances), and request your employer to provide the required support to make the job safer. The key steps involved are;
1. Hazard identification
2. Safe Work Practices
3. Personal Protective Equipment
4. Contingency Planning
5. Risk Communication
Hazard Identification: Half the battle is won, if we identify the risks associated with the specific occupation one is into. This is not always evident or intuitive. As mentioned, in some situations, like for the mahout, the hazard is visible and ever present. In my childhood, the rations hop owner always sat in the same room where kerosene was kept. However the ration shop owner hardly realizes that the fumes from the kerosene drum behind his seat has the potential to kill him one day. What can you do in such a situation? A very simplified approach to hazard identification will be the following:
1. Look where you are working: In many situations, the place where you work itself is the hazard. For example, for the toddy tapper, height is the biggest occupational hazard. Similarly if you structurally look at your workplace, you will see if there are inherent risks associated with the workplace.
2. Look what is around your workplace: Sometimes, it is not the location of your work but what is in or around that location that is going to hurt you. For people who regularly enter wells to clean up, toxic gases accumulated over period of time is the hazard. For those who go to cut grass, it could be the snake. Once again, if you think through, in most situations, these are evident.
3. Look at your tools: Many a time, the tools you work with are the hazards. For the butcher, it is the knife and for modern carpenter it is the electric drill.
4. Consider what you are working with: For example, using a plier to chip off insulation from a live wire is very different from doing the same on a disconnected cable. Plumbing operations on the water pipe is a lot safer than doing the same action on an oil pipeline.
5. Think what exactly you are doing: Of course what you do can also hurt you. For the headload worker, the way load is lifted and moved is a big occupational risk. For the salesgirl at the supermarket, it is the standing (or sitting) for long hours which is the main challenge.
6. Look at who works with you: Unskilled and inexperienced colleagues can often become an occupational hazard. Let us say you are a wood cutter and you have entrusted the task of judging when the tree is about to fall to somebody who is not familiar with the task. You could put yourself in big trouble.
In the examples above, I have tried to give examples of situations of very ordinary jobs which have severe and, at times, fatal consequences. My assumption is that if you are working in an organized sector you are more likely to be better informed about your occupational hazards. I know this is not a good assumption to make (e.g., very few IT professionals truly understand the issues about posture, staring at the computer monitor for long hours, and work-hour irregularities.) but, at least, they have the options and means to find out if they wish to.
Safe Working Practices: Once you identify the risks associated with a job, you have to go through the following thought process.
1. Is there a safer way of doing the same work by doing the work differently, with better planning, more support, and appropriate personal protective equipment (see next section)?
2. If there are residual risks associated with the job, even after taking all the risk-reducing measures, is the payment sufficiently high to make it attractive and/or is the employer providing suitable insurance measures?
3. If the work cannot be done safely and if there is not adequate compensation, do you really want to take up this job?
The answer to the first question is always positive. For every job in Kerala that I can think of there is a safer way of doing if only we think about it carefully. The kerosene drum can always be moved to a secured and well-ventilated outside area in the ration shop. There are ways to measure oxygen in a confined space before you enter it and if there is not enough oxygen you should not enter it (or do so only with self contained breathing apparatus). You can always open the septic tank a day before you enter it to allow the toxic gases to escape. The key is to be conscious about the hazards. Once the hazard is known, there is enough common sense in our workmen and their supervisors to figure out a safer way of working. The main issue is that people have been doing the work so routinely that they don’t think of the hazards anymore. People have been taking the risk so often that they think there is no other way of working.
I must add a very simple technique of safe-working here, which costs nothing. This refers to the idea “isolation of working area”. In Kerala, it is common to see people who have nothing to do with a task crowding around a workplace. More novel the work, more bystanders would be found standing around. Take the example of cutting a tree on the roadside. There will be two people involved in cutting the tree and twenty onlookers. When something goes wrong and the tree falls, in a normal case two people would have been hurt, but in our case there would be twenty-two.
There is another reason why we don’t need unauthorized persons at a workplace. Let us take the scenario similar to the lodge that collapsed in Trivandrum. A number of people got buried under the debris. When the fire and rescue service arrived on the location, nobody was able to tell them how many people were likely to be buried because nobody knew. They may know how many people would have been working and how many have survived. But what they really wouldn’t know is how many onlookers were hanging around and whether any has been buried. Consequently, in addition to the loss of unwanted lives, time and effort of rescue workers are also lost looking for people who are not actually buried.
One of the simple techniques of workplace safety is isolation. Workplace is an unsafe place and people who have no business to be there should not be present. In industrial areas, there are of course compound walls and security gates. However, once we enter such areas, the control breaks down to a certain extent. Our construction sites are a disaster in themselves. There is no system of visitor registration or site isolation. This creates unnecessary workplace risk. When something happens to an individual, nobody, neither the contractor nor the insurer will cover a visitor. Think about it.
Once again, due to the large number of occupations, it is impossible for me to list out a safer alternative to each of the work practices. However, for you, young office workers (most likely to be a part of the online readers of this article), please take regular breaks from your work— a minimum of once every two hours and go for a small walk.
Personal Protective Equipment
Personal protective equipment (PPE) refers to the gear that you can wear, which will protect you from specific hazards. Helmets, masks, gloves, etc., are common examples of PPE. For more specialized jobs, there are more sophisticated PPE available. Goggles for welders, aluminum suit for firemen, and disposable coverall for asbestos workers are the more sophisticated but less familiar PPE in Kerala.
There are three things that one should understand while talking about PPE. Firstly, there are PPEs available for even simple jobs. For example, there is a specialized metal mesh glove available for butchers and cooks for daily use. Wearing this will ensure that even if the knife slips and lands a cut on the hand while cutting meat, it will not severely injure the hand. In the absence of this glove, the person may not die but may loose a finger. So PPEs not just protect life, but to enable you to carry out your work safely. Again, the type of PPEs needed for every kind of work is too numerous to elaborate in one article, but this information is entirely available in the public domain.
Secondly, PPEs are not an alternative to safe working practices. PPEs should be seen as the “last line of defense”. If all other precautions of safe working fail and the hazard eventually gets to you, PPE would give you a final chance to remain safe, reduce the injury, or give you few extra minutes of life. Wearing PPE should not make people take extra risks with their life or make them carry out the work in an unsafe manner.
Thirdly, you must always use the correct PPE which give you defense against the hazards you are facing. It is common these days to see road construction workers who work with molten bitumen having yellow safety helmets. This gives a sense of “safety awareness” at site, which is completely false. The real danger for those handling molten bitumen is it falling over their body and the fumes. The correct PPE needed are masks, coveralls, gloves and safety shoes. Yet often you see these workers with flip flops, lungis, bare hands but a helmet. Our ignorance in the safety sphere is amazing. For those among the readers who have more sophisticated understanding of safety and may think I am simplifying too much, let me also add that there are many different type of masks available. The fact that we use “masks” is not really good enough. What is good for asbestos is not what is good for benzene. Again, these are subjects for entire articles in themselves so I will not elaborate.
Finally, in almost all cases, there has been resistance to the adaption of PPE around the world. This stems out of two reasons. Firstly, wearing PPE takes getting used to and often makes it a bit more uncomfortable (at least in the beginning) for you to do your job. Secondly, there is this “macho” feeling that “tough men” don’t wear PPE. One of the emails circulating on the internet states that “Testicular Guards were introduced in cricket in 1874 while helmets were introduced in 1974. It took men about 100 years to understand that brain is also important!” I still remember the debate we had those days about helmets and if I remember correctly Sunil Gavaskar did not wear helmets for a very long time.
Contingency Planning: After risk identification, implementing safer work practices, and using correct PPEs, one should also expect to have incidents for a number of reasons. One of the basic reasons is that people make mistakes. Secondly, instruments could malfunction. Thirdly, tools could break. Fourthly, external factors could intervene (e.g., lightning strike when somebody is working on the top of a tower) and in spite of PPE one may sustain injuries. Contingency planning is an element of keeping people safe by thinking through what can go wrong and be prepared for it. This ranges from having access to a first-aid kit, a person being trained in first aid, access to an ambulance, ability to do limited fire fighting and so on. A contingency plan also calls for a hierarchial system of decision making. Who will take the importance decision in the crucial minutes following an accident? This person needs to know he is responsible, be trained for it, and empowered with authority. There is nothing worse than ten people standing at a construction site and giving contradictory instructions after a tragic incident. The person is responsible for the decision and the buck stops with him.
Big organizations have elaborate contingency plans prepared by professionals and often exercised periodically. However, it is not just the big operators who need contingency plans. Anybody who is involved in digging earth from the side of a hill should consider the possibility that the side will collapse and fall on the guys who could be buried in the process. Every year, this happens multiple numbers of times in Kerala, leading to deaths. How we can minimize the number of causalities in such a situation can be thought about prior to starting the excavation. One of the key challenges in such a situation is to locate where these individuals have been buried. The sooner they can be located, the chances of their rescue is maximum. Right now, there is no system. One can only comb square meter by square meter to locate the buried and almost always before we reach them, it is too late.
There is an easy way around this. In Europe, you can buy a small instrument called “avalanche beacon”, which can be bought by anybody who goes skiing in dangerous areas. This costs around 5000 rupees. If an avalanche happens and they are buried under meters of snow, this instrument will send out signals that can be tracked by a detector and help can be brought within minutes to them. This equipment can be easily customized for people who do earth digging in Kerala. Five thousand rupees is about the cost of three loads of earth being sold and, typically, hundreds of loads of earth is moved from such locations every day. Moreover these beacons can be used over a long time. So their introduction can be cheap and an effective way of saving lives.
Due to shortage of space, I am not elaborating more on contingency planning, but it suffices to say that if we were to think through the possibilities of something going wrong, we can already have plans in place to minimize casualties when accidents actually happen.
Risk Communication: I will end the section on workplace safety talking about risk communication. In far too many situations, even when risks are assessed, people, even those who are working within a company, are not aware of the nature of the risks and the contingency plans if something goes wrong. It is therefore absolutely essential that all workplace risks are communicated to all those who have a stake in it.
This primarily refers to those who are working at the place and are exposed to the risk on a daily basis. Once the risk associated with a certain task is identified, everybody who is working at that site should be told about what risk is involved. This will enable them to be careful and act in a responsible fashion. In a complex operation, one part of the crew may not understand the risk their work poses to other part of the job. Welding operations near a petrol station is a case in point. Staff in the petrol station is aware of the risks relating to handling of inflammable gases. However, the crew of welders who arrive there to build a new tank or mend an old one treat it as a normal welding operation and work with naked flames leading to explosion and death. Drivers who drive dangerous cargo is another example.
Sometime workplace risk spills over outside the boundaries too. Situations like Bhopal will be the result. Subsequent to the Bhopal tragedy, there is now an international requirement to inform those who live around an industrial operation, who are likely to be impacted by an incident about what can go wrong and what they can do to protect themselves should an industrial accident happen. It is not just the people who should be informed of this. Local hospitals should be informed of any specialized chemical that may be involved and they may need a stock of the required antidotes.
Now, it is not just in big factories that risks spill over beyond their boundaries. I was chatting with my late ammayi in Kothamangalam one afternoon when suddenly we heard an explosion and rocks started spilling over our roof breaking tiles (incidentally asbestos). This went on for, what looked like, a long time. Only when it all cleared up, we figured out what happened. Our neighbor Keshappan Nair was digging a new well and as part of it was “blasting” granites. The process had gone wrong (probably more charge was put than required or less cover was made), which resulted in this “kallu mazha”. I was lucky (immediately). I have seen deaths happening from much less severe incidents. Now if the asbestos will get me in the long term, I have to wait and see.
The series will continue, be safe.

As mentioned previously, my first book was published earlier this year. An idea to write a book was long in the making. It took some good contacts, little push and couple of disasters to make it a reality.

However, the second book is coming up somewhat easily. I am writing a series on safety issues for Mathrubhumi and once that conclude, we will bring that out as a book.

Having thus secured two books and learnt the trade of publishing, I am now considering the third book. My first two books were about safety, somewhat boring subject, though very useful. But the third one will be a collection of little funny stories from my life. In personal conversations, I narrate these and they always seem popular. This will be the first time I will be writing creatively. Much of this is actually in written form in various places. I need to compile, edit, translate and then publish.

That brings me to my fourth book, which will be defining in nature. This will not be like anything else I have written. This will be about my life as I passed through the most intensive period. This will be a statement of truth, a record of justice, an investigation of science and a commentary of society. This has been burning in my head for few years but now I am stable enough to sit back and write it.

I will start to write this in the coming days and my website readers will have the previlege to preview it. Please let me have your comments coming.

My latest article on Safety, this time related to trains, is now online at Mathrubhumi Online.

http://www.mathrubhumi.com/story.php?id=116004

More importantly, since this is the third in the series, Mathrubhumi has also linked the previous articles to this one. So now onwards, you can have a one stop shop.

The English version might come online too, but for those of you who dont want to wait, here it is.

Safety in Trains………..

By international standards, trains are comparatively a safer mode of transport as against road transport. This is supported by a number of reasons. Trains have fixed track in which they travel and there is strict control over what else can get onto these tracks. Trains are driven by people who are trained and employed to do that job. You cannot have untrained or amateur drivers taking around their private vehicles along the railway track (as is possible in the case of road, water, or air). Trains and tracks are owned and operated by organized institutions that have a vested interest in maintaining the safety record. Consequently, they continuously improve design and operational procedures with a view to increase safety. The net result is that you get a much safer travel media in the rail traffic.

I have read somewhere that Indian Railways is the biggest Railway system in the world with tens of thousands of kilometers of track, hundreds of thousands of compartments, more than a million employees and many millions of commuters every day. From personal experience, I also know that is the most cost effective mode for long distance travel in India. When I travelled last year with Indian Railways, after almost a decade, I found that all aspects of the system (punctuality, speed, conveniences) have increased. Of course one could always ask for and expect more but I have great admiration for the people who run this massive organization and deliver such services at very low cost to millions of people.

I have no information about the precise accident statistics of rail transport in India (though I think it will be useful to present this information on the Indian Railways website and also in the Indian Railways Time Tables). However, some of the publications on safety of Indian Railways, which I could obtain from the Internet, shows that the accident statistics relating to the Indian Railways is showing continuous improvement, thought it is not mentioned how it compares with statistics of other railways around the world. I also have been reading that the Indian Railways is investing increasing amounts of money and focusing more attention on safety matters. This is indeed good news.

In spite of the above, not a week passes in Kerala where we do not have an incident of somebody getting injured or killed that involves a train in someway or other. It could be somebody falling off the train as happened with a young lady last week in Trichur or somebody being hit by a train as he was trying to rescue a cow that was standing on the tracks as happened last month. Though we have not, luckily, had dramatic train accidents in Kerala for some time now, occasionally we do hear about train accidents in other parts of the country, like the major accident in Sainthia last week. So, it is obvious that there is room for thinking about your safety with regards to trains too. In line with my earlier article, the focus of this article is about what you can do as an individual to improve your own safety than what the railways should do about it. Indeed, there is a lot that the railways can do, but that does not negate the need for you to be careful and vigilant about your own safety.

Crossing the tracks: I don’t know the exact number of people who die every year in Kerala as they cross the rail tracks in the station or elsewhere. However, we do hear about such incidents regularly. It is not unfair to state that all these deaths could be prevented if only the concerned individuals (and families, when it involved children) were more mindful about their safety. According to one of the reports that I read, the Indian Railways has more than 60,000 km length of tracks, and while creating a wall all along this tracks to prevent people from crossing the tracks (as is the case with the famous bullet train tracks if my memory is correct) is theoretically possible, that will be both expensive and more obstructive to the life of people who live close to these tracks. So it is not unfair from the part of the railways to expect a bit more due diligence from the part of the people who cross the railways. Some simple such as the following precautions easily could save few lives:

1. One should never walk on the railway track, at any time of the day, even if you are living close to the line and is familiar with the timing of various trains. A repair vehicle or a goods train can suddenly appear from either side and smash you into smithereens before you have time to react.
2. At stations or any other locations where there is a provision for an over-bridge, always take the bridge however tempting the “crossing the track” looks and however many other people are crossing the lines. There is no safety in numbers when it comes to crossing the tracks.
3. At locations where there is no over-bridge, you should always cross at a location where the track is visible at both sides to a safe distance. You should stop, observe both sides, and quickly move across. Once again, make your own observation and judgment and don’t follow the herd like a sheep. Work within your comfort level.
4. If you are at a very long straight stretch and if you can see that the train is very far don’t cross the track unless the train has passed. Your sense of judgment of the train’s position, status, and speed is very likely to be wrong

Accident at Manned Level Crossings: As per the safety report on Indian Railways that I mentioned earlier, there are bout 20,000 manned level crossings and 16,000 unmanned level crossings on the Indian Railways tracks. The report says 16% of the accidents happen at unmanned level crossings, which is very understandable, considering the dangerous interface between road and train traffic that is not guarded on either side. What will amaze a safety professionals around the world is the fact that 4 % of the accidents happen at manned level crossings.

Of course, this will not amaze us who live in Kerala and occasionally have to cross railway lines. At the Edappally railway crossing next to the Amritha hospital (which I occasionally cross), traffic can back up up to kilometers causing hours of delay. So anybody who can jump the queue will cut to the front of the line. Even if the bars are down for the approaching train, people bend under the bars, including with their motorbikes, have a glance on either side, and quickly cross over to the other side, saving time. Of course, they score everyday over the hundreds of stupid people in the queue who wait for the gate to open. One day, their judgment will fail them and then they will cut the queue of millions of people in their journey to heaven. (In Edappally, you also see this very funny situation of a half-built overpass, which has been there for many years, I wonder why this has not been completed. There is a good reason, I am sure).

In Switzerland, where the railway network is extensive and where I travel by road a lot, there is no concept of manned level crossings. Instead they have an automatic system by which a bar will come down to block the traffic minutes before the train appears and will lift seconds after the trains have left. What is amazing about this system is that these bars only extend to one side of the road (meaning on a two-way road, the cross bar just bars the direction of traffic on each direction). If this system was introduced in Kerala, I can imagine not only bikes, scooters, and autos driving zigzag across these barriers, but also cars and tippers trying their luck. Yet you see nothing of that sort there. Though it may be that they believe less in God, nobody is in a hurry to meet their Lord either!!

In my articles, I have not been focusing on the need to obey laws because I take that as a given. So it is not for me to advice people that they should not sneak under the cross bar at a manned level crossing. People who willfully violate laws, such as exceeding speed limits, drink and drive, speak on the cellphones while driving, or don’t put on helmets when they drive, will sooner or later pay with their health or life for their behavior. What I have been focusing is on behaviors that are strictly not illegal, and at times even intuitive, but have the potential to jeopardize your safety. I will therefore give the following suggestions regarding level crossings:

1. If you have to cross at a manned level crossing regularly and the delays are becoming unpredictable, look for an alternative route that even if longer is more predictable. The peer pressure and temptation to cut short is irresistible while in the queue, so avoid the situation to begin with.
2. If you are an occasional traveler, just factor this time into your travel plan than try to cut it short by taking risks.
3. At unmanned level crossings, trust only YOUR observations and judgment. Don’t drive into the track just because the guy in front of you has driven through and the guy behind you is honking. You are basically in charge of your own safety. If the guy behind you is in a hurry, bad luck for him. You make your own observations, and when you are comfortable, that you can drive across safely, only then you move your vehicle forward,

Scrap dealers’ dream: In every country I travel, I make it a point to travel by train whenever possible. This is for many reasons. First and foremost, you see lot more of the country when you travel by train. You also see more of its people, their life, and their diversity when you travel by train. It gives me a better sense of safety and control (there is an emergency stop button in the train, but not in an aircraft!). Finally, increasingly, I prefer rail journeys because it leaves a lower carbon footprint than road or air travel.

In all these travels that I made, which probably exceeds travel by trains in at least 25 countries, I have never come across a door as unique and solid as that of the Indian Railways. There are three features which make the doors in our trains unique. Firstly, they don’t close automatically before the train leaves, which is the case in most modern railway coaches. Secondly, they can be opened while the train is in motion, which is not possible for doors in other trains in other countries. Finally, they are exceptionally heavy that if you are standing at the door and if the door closes on you with force, you can be seriously injured or even die even if the train is not moving. The doors of the passenger compartments in Indian Railways is a scrap dealer’s dream and a safety professional’s nightmare.

The consequence of a heavy door that does not close before the train leaves and can be opened while the train is in motion is a disaster. A number of the tragic deaths that we hear of is a consequence of this door design. I am sure there was a very good reason to have this design and few very good reasons to keep it going. However, this design has also created bad habits in our society which further compounds accidents. Let me illustrate few cases:

1. It is routine to see in our railway stations people getting into the train compartments to see their near ones off. It is equally routine that those who are travelling stand on the platforms with their families and friends before the train leaves. Every day, in Ernakulum South you see a dozen people jumping out of the train just as a dozen is trying to jump in through the same door AFTER the train has started moving. A number of deaths happen during this mad rush. In modern train designs, the train door closes before the train moves and nobody can get in or get out totally eliminating this risk.
2. As the train doors can be opened while the train is in motion, it gives people a possibility to jump in after the train has moved (e.g.. those who are late) and jump out even if the train does not have a stop at a particular place (this frequently happens in Aluva for express trains that do not stop here).
3. As a long distance rail traveler for many years, travelling 52 hours to Kanpur by the Kochin-Gorakhpur Express, it was routine to see people sitting or standing on the sills of the doors with the door open, for hours together. It just needs a jerk of the train as it passes a joint or takes a curve, for door to fling close on those sitting there, throwing them out to sure death. Again, something not possible in modern trains where doors simply don’t open when the train is in motion!
4. When the train door is open while the train is in motion, one could be thrown off through the door even if they are not standing at the door but standing at the wash basin (placed right behind the door, yet another design feature) or passing to the toilet or going to another compartment. Once again, if the door remains shut while the train is in motion this would not have happened..

One could argue, and one should, that this particular design should be modified and our train doors should also be made safer like that in modern trains. However, remember we are dealing with the Indian Railways, which has about 400,000 passenger vehicles. So, even if the suggestion for a change is accepted, it will be a decade before we will have it implemented across the country. I can safely say that the scrap dealer who will be buying the last piece of this heavy door from Indian Railways is not yet born.

So the fact remains that there is a design issue with the door, which may one day get corrected, and is not going to help you or me who is travelling on the train today and tomorrow. So what can you do to save yourselves, and your family, during train journeys? The answers are self evident from the above observations, but let me state them explicitly.

1. If you are going to see off somebody at the station, DON’T get into the train with them. If they have heavy luggage or if they need assistance, take the assistance of a railway porter. Trust me, 99% of our railway porters are honest and the price they ask for their service is very modest. We are often worried to use their services because of our experiences with similar people outside the stations.
2. If somebody is coming to see you off, ask them to preferably see you off outside the station but in no case you should stand on the platform seeing goodbye to them. You get into the train as soon as the train arrives and wave from the window if you must.
3. Don’t EVER sit or stand on the door sill while the train leaves the station or thereafter. This is a sure invitation to trouble
4. Be exceptionally vigilant while using the wash basin and hold onto something, to the tap if required. In any case, don’t leave your children unattended while they use the wash basin or go to the toilet.
5. Avoid crossing the door area of the train to the degree possible while the train is in motion if the door is open.
6. Don’t ever try to jump into the train or out of it while it is in motion. If you miss a train or a station that is no big deal. It might cost you few extra hours or few hundreds rupees more but compared to the shortening of your life or the cost of your lives, these are nothing. With everybody having access to mobile phone these days, there is not even a social reason to do something that stupid anymore.

Trust me, water at the train stations are safe! Most of us believe that the water available at railway stations in our country is not fit for drinking. We buy bottled water or cola instead. I used to think that too, and in those days, there was nobody selling bottled water and our option was to have a big water bottle filled with safe water from home or hostel before we started our journey. In 1992, my friend Dr. M.G. Grasius, who was doing Ph.D. IIT Kanpur (currently principal of Vishwajyothi Engineering College), did an experiment. He collected water from every station from Kanpur to Ernakulam South and using a rapid detection method, checked the water for its bacteriological quality. The results were counter intuitive. Contrary to our belief and expectations, the water we collected from running taps in the railways stations across India, except one, turned out to be fit for drinking from a bacteriological point of view. (The exception was Ernakulam South, we were a bit ashamed by this finding!)

However, this perception has not changed even now. These days everybody buys bottled drinking water. It is demonstrated all over the world that the bottled water industry is much less regulated than drinking water supplied at public taps, and often the public tap water is safer. So people who are selling bottled water are basically feeding on your fear and lack of information. I can only imagine that quality of water served in the railway stations in India has improved as with every other service of Indian Railways. If I were to travel again on Indian Railways, I would therefore stick to the water taps or water taken from home than the bottled water you can buy.

Getting Sick on a train: Getting sick on a train is not really a safety issue yet I would like to touch on it because we often hear tragic stories of people getting sick, not being attended to, at times dying, and worse, not having enough support to get the dead bodies back to Kerala. All the above are difficult situations, to various degrees, and let us see what we as individuals can do to prevent it from happening and handling it if it does happen.

Indian Railways, being old and having had to deal with all sorts of issues, I am sure there are already procedures in place to handle each of the above conditions. I also read that in the latest Railway Budget speech that services of a doctor would be made available in each of the long-distance trains. I also read that Indian Railways is planning to start new medical colleges. I don’t know if the plan of Indian Railways would be to train doctors who will then serve in the railways, including on long-distance trains. In any case, in line with my earlier prescriptions, we know that the situation is far from perfect at this point of time. And consequently, till the time things are all in place, you have to take responsibility for your health and those family members (or friends around you) if they are dependent on you. This means that you should have a reasonable understanding about their health status and ability to travel the distance you are intending to travel.

I would divide the health issues that arise during the train journey into two. First are situations that arise during the train journey (accidents, injury from an incident, stomach upset, etc). Second are those situations where a pre-existing condition (blood pressure, diabetes) gets worse. I am not referring to situations like fever, jaundice, or chicken pox getting worse during travel as one should never start journey with those illnesses or symptoms, whatever be the reasons. I am also not referring to those situations where you are undertaking the train journey with a patient with a view to get him expert medical advice (e.g. from Kochi to Vellore) because I am assuming you would be well briefed by doctors in such cases. For other situations, let me give you the following suggestions:

1. You should always a have a small medical kit with you that carry medicines for common ailments like fever, the stomach bug, and small burns and cuts, even if you are a healthy adult travelling alone. It is my personal experience that the very fact that you have access to medicines if need be increases your tolerance level.
2. If you or anybody in your care has a pre-existing medical situation, you should always consult your doctor prior to making the travel arrangements, explaining the duration and mode of travel and take their advice as to whether to postpone the travel or take any special precautions needed. This may include having access to specific medicines, special food, or request to break journey into two. With air travels not too expensive, if planned well in advance, I would suggest that long-distance travel with people of pre-existing medical conditions (which could aggravate) should preferably be done by air. This will ensure that the duration of period when you are unsure of proper medical care is minimized. The anxiety of long travel itself could aggravate the medical condition, especially in old people.
3. If, in spite of your precautions and medications, you are on a train and the situation is escalating, you should talk to the authorities on the train. In most situations, there will be doctors available on the train as passengers and TTE would be able to identify them (from their Dr. title, one of the reasons why I don’t use my Dr. title as I am not a medical doctor and don’t want some panicked passenger to feel, even momentarily, that I can help!). Once again, the very fact that you have assured access to a doctor, if needed, will keep the situation under control during the journey.
4. If a doctor is not available and the TTE suggests you seek medical advice at a station or the TTE is not being helpful, but you feel you need professional help, don’t hesitate to break your journey. It is much better to bear the inconvenience of breaking a journey than to live with the consequences of not taking the right decision in the long run.
5. These days, most major stations will have modern medical centers in the city and with access to cash with ATMs, obtaining proper medical care is not a major issue. In most cases, tragedies happen because people wait too long either due to the inconvenience associated with breaking the journey or expecting the system to arrange for medical help without having to break the journey. Remember, it is your health and you are responsible for it. It does not help you if your allegation that the appropriate medical support was not made available by the system at the right time is true if the patient dies in the meanwhile. Your primary objective is not to teach accountability but to ensure proper healthcare.
6. Then there is the situation when you are travelling alone and you have to make all the judgments and decisions. These days, frankly, to me, this is a non issue. Everybody in the train has access to mobile phones and you can inform people who you expect to come to your assistance very easily. Basically, you should get over your dilemma of whether to bother them too early. Once again, err on the side of caution, that is the best policy. If you have a pre-existing medical condition, I would suggest that you have details of that and the medicines you take regularly available with you during any journey, just in case. (Recall the tragic case of a Kerala Government officer being picked up by police and suspected of drunken driving while what he was actually going through was a bout of illness. Correct knowlwege of his condition may have saved his life).
7. I will also add the situation where you are travelling alone or in a group and is involved in a major accident, like the one in Sainthia, you are not in a situation to inform anybody (severely injured, no access to phones, cash, etc), how can you maximize your chances of survival? This is where the first principle of journey management comes into play. Regardless of how short or how long a travel you make (be it on a bicycle to the nearby shop or by plane to the other part of the globe), there must always be somebody back home who knows at all times where you are travelling and when you will reach there. Once again, in this age of the mobile phone, it is not at all complicated for you to send an SMS to your wife/husband/brother/father when you board a train and when you reach the destination. So as soon as the news breaks on the TV about accident, your near one knows if your train was involved. If you are in the accident-stricken train, and you are safe or in a condition to use your mobile, please call home or your contact point as soon as possible telling them what happened, and your current condition. If you do not call, your contact point should immediately activate support systems to ensure you that you are tracked and the right attention is brought to you. If you already have established this position, you will also be in a much more relaxed condition if you are involved in an accident as you know help will come soon even if you could not inform anybody.
8. I want to tell you about the most tragic of all situations. You are travelling with your family and something happens and somebody in your group is dead. This is an emotional, procedural, and logistics nightmare and something which you are not prepared to handle. Here, as somebody experienced in this line of business, I am going to give you an impassionate advice which probably is not easy to swallow. Firstly, remember the person dead is near to you and the experience you are having is a once-in-a-lifetime event. However, for everybody else with whom you will have to deal (railway official, hospital, police, airlines), the person is just another “dead body” and a situation that they handle periodically. So don’t expect others to show the same respect, urgency, or attention that you want.
9. In 99% of the situations, you would like to take the dead body back to your home town as soon as possible. However, remember, death has given finality to the situation. There is no more “hurry” to do anything. Yes, I am familiar with religious practices, which mandates the burial of the person as soon as possible, but in these days of international travel everybody understands the practical constraints and communities and religious leaders are flexible. Bodies of people who die in some middle-eastern countries are often released after months due to procedural reasons and our societies have learnt to live with that type of situation too. So if in your case, if takes an extra day or two, do not get agitated.
10. I know, from practical experience, that this is not easy for you to accept. Also, when you just had somebody dear to you dying in front of you, you are overcome by grief and often by guilt (I shouldn’t have started the journey, I should have sought medical attention earlier, I could no give best medical care, etc.). You as an individual are therefore not the best person to handle all the procedures and logistics associated with sending the dead body back to your home town. You will be exhausted and agitated which upsets your judgment and makes you disproportionately angry. It will be really tragic if you end up with a police case in an unknown town of having assaulted a doctor, hospital attendant, railway staff, or an airline official over an argument about the procedures, timing, and protocol of handling the body. Remember, the body you are trying to handle is something dear to you, but for all other actors in the process, it is just another body and they may not share your anxieties.
11. It is therefore best that once death is confirmed, the procedures associated with handling of the body are NOT handled by those who are closest to the deceased. Instead, you should seek assistance from your friends, the local Kerala association, and if neither is available, request someone to arrive from your home town to handle these. If that takes 48 hours extra, let it be so. Remember, death is final and there is nothing more you can do for the deceased. Don’t make the situation worse than what it currently is.

Getting drugged on train is not a safety issue. Not a month passes these days in Kerala without a case of a passenger being drugged by a fellow (con) passenger for the purpose of robbery. What amazes me is that even though we hear such stories every month, you still get new victims. It is like the case of “visa thattippu”. You hear such stories everyday and wonder why people are not learning from other’s experiences.

Deliberately drugging people for the purpose of theft is not a safety issue but a security one (in safety issues, there is no intention to do any harm) and my articles usually do not cover security issues. However, I will make one exception this time as many people these days consider the possibility of drugging a safety issue associated with train travel and I do have some good experience on this to share.

While the drugging incident is new to the Kerala scene, this is not new to Indian Railways. In 1988, I was sitting on the Platform No. 1 of Kanpur Central Railway station receiving delegates arriving for a national seminar when we saw a heavily built army person being pushed out of a compartment. He was standing, could barely walk, and had a blank expression on his face. Other than the army uniform he was wearing he had no luggage with him. Fellow passengers, who were trying to get him off from the train, told us that he was drugged and robbed in the train. They were worried that if he is not attended to he will die by falling off the train.

This was the first time I came across a passenger-drugging incident. If you are left drugged on an Indian Railway compartment, it is very easy to die because there are not enough systems in place to look after you and the structural reasons I mentioned. Unless you are in a group and your group members are not drugged not many people will break their journey to give you proper medical attention.

In this case, our solider friend had a happier ending. I knew that in every major north Indian railway station there is an office of the Indian armed forces called the MCO (Movement Control Office) to help and facilitate the travel of army personnel. With help of my friend who was also there manning the reception booth, we took him to the MCO who immediately identified him from his badge and instantly brought him the required attention. He was lucky.

Many other people are not that lucky. Most lose valuables, but more importantly, they end up drugged, their nervous system damaged, and occasionally falling off the train to death.

I once got interested in the history of robbery in North India (after I read the book by The Last Mughal by William Darlymple) and was told about their elaborate ways. It is a fascinating subject. Apparently, the tradition of robbery and dacoity goes back by centuries. In case of robberies, the technique of robbing by drugging predates the existence of Indian Railways. Pilgrims going to Banaras (Kashi) or Haridwar were their preferred targets. The robbers, who often worked with their families, would join the pilgrim caravan and befriend the targeted families en route. Those days, it must have taken weeks of walking to Banaras and so they had time. So these thugs, their families including children in attendance, stalked their victims for days. In this process, they achieved the confidence of these unsuspecting or even usually careful families. At an appropriate time they would drug the food of the families and decamp with their entire belongings. The drugs they would administer, in those days, were made of natural materials and were not fatal.

Anyway, the point I was making was that the practice of drugging people for robbery is not new in North India and has been there for sometime in Northern Railways. However, this seems to be a recent import to Kerala. What is worrying is that these days most of the thugs resort to allopathic medicines. Since the objective of the robber is to decapacitate the enemy as soon as possible, excessive dose is given which sometimes lead to fatalities even. So the risk has increased.

There is no real remedy to this situation except being eternally conscious of this possibility and constantly vigilant about you being made a target of attack. This, naturally, takes a certain amount of fun out of long-distance rail journeys as meeting new people, talking to them, sharing experience and food with them are all part of the cultural experience of the rail journey. However, if you want you and your family to be secure, it is best to ensure that you restrict your friendship to exchange of conversation and not food and drinks. Nor should you allow others to buy food for you.

Let me conclude this section with a fascinating story I read about robbery in North India, recounted in the famous book “A Sorcerers Apprentice” (by Tahir Shah).

The hero of this book, grandson of an Afghan King, had read all about the conmen and robbers who operate on the trains in North India before he travelled to India from UK. As he got on a train from Aligarh to travel to Calcutta, he had packed all his valuables, including his passport and foreign currency, inside his luggage, attached it to the train seat. He dressed modestly in Indian dress so as not to appear foreign or a wealthy target. In the evening, a young couple, apparently just after their wedding, entered his compartment and sat across him. The girl was bedecked in gold jewelry and the guy appeared somewhat naïve. So our hero explains to them the possibility of theft on the train and suddenly the couple is all worried. They are also very thankful to the hero for explaining this to them. The lady takes off all her ornaments, puts them into the bag and both the lady and husband are keeping vigil along with our hero.

Evening comes and the husband asks our hero if he would mind guarding their luggage and in particular the ornaments while they took a nap. Our hero, having decided not to sleep to avoid thieves, agrees readily. The bag with golden ornaments is entrusted to him for safekeeping and the couple goes for a good night of sleep. Past midnight the husband wakes up and asks the hero if he would like to take rest and he will do the vigil. Our hero agrees to this idea, only to wake up in the morning to find that the young lady, her husband and all his valuables, including passport, are gone.

So you never know how a trickster will gain your confidence and I can confess that even a safety expert employed by UN is no good match for good conmen. Your best bet is to be vigilant, at all times.

Be safe.

Muralee Thummarukudy is Emergency Management Expert with over 15 years of experience in Industry and United Nations. Muralee frequently blogs about safety issues at http://www.muraleethummarukudy.com

The views expressed here in are those of the author, and do not necessarily reflect the views of the United Nations.

Tags: kerala, mathrubhumi, safety, Trains

I want to start by thanking those who read my article on “Surviving in the Roads in Kerala”, which was published on Mathrubhumi and send me feedbacks. I am continuing with the series to other areas where preventable deaths are happening too.

I want to reiterate one point repeatedly. In Brunei Shell, where I worked, in every office, there was a big book that had a title “Open this book to see the person who is responsible for your safety”. You open the cover and you see a mirror, implying the person responsible for your safety is yourself. The focus of my article is similar. Ultimately, our safety is our responsibility. We, as individuals, can do a lot to improve our own safety and of those around us. This is not to suggest that structural improvements are not necessary or Government need not act, but those are matters that are not within an individual’s control. In response to the findings in Thekkady, training norms for boat drivers or safety standards for boat building may be changed one day, but that is not going to help you if you are going for boating next week. Also, what I suggest are “no regret” options. Options that will not harm any one individual even in the presence of better infrastructure and improved legislation.

In this article, I will cover safety in water. I don’t have the statistics of the number of people dying in water every year but every other day I read stories about people, young and old, dying by drowning in Kerala. This could be as dramatic as a boat capsizing in Thekkady killing 45 people or a young child drowning in a bucket in his home. While deaths by drowning happens round the year, the monsoon season especially seems to record more deaths for obvious reasons.

Comparatively speaking, water is a very safe medium. It is safe because so long as you float in the water, it does not kill you (this is not the case with fire!!). It is safe because there are no defined “highways” in the water and you hardly hear about head-on collision between boats, certainly not in numbers comparable to road accidents.

Yet scores of people, probably hundreds of people, die in our waters every year. They die in our seas, backwaters, rivers, canals, streams, wells, ponds, swimming pools and occasionally, in a small bucket in our homes. The majority of these deaths are entirely preventable if only we took a bit more ownership of our lives and those around us.

Last month, four students drowned in Punalur. According to media reports, a group of students were bathing and having a good time in the river when one student lost his way and went to the deep waters. A number of his friends jumped in to save him and four of them died in the process. The original guy in trouble managed to survive by hanging on to the branch of a tree.

This incident brings to mind the question, “Should you save your drowning friend?”

At a moral level, this is a comparatively easy question. Of course, you should! But when seen from the angle of a safety expert, the answer could be slightly different. To illustrate this point, let me start from another point.

In 1996, my friend Babu came to visit me in Brunei and we went for a drive to Labi, the hilly area on the boarder with Sarawak (Malaysia). We had to cross a stream (by walking) to reach a scenic spot and there were lot of people holidaying around in the area. As we came back to our car park, after crossing the stream, suddenly there was a flash flood. There was a group of Indians and half of them were stuck on one side, the other in the car park, and both started crying. Babu, who grew up in Kerala, and was a confident swimmer, wanted to swim across (the stream could not be crossed by walking anymore) and help the family. I refused to allow him. He was very angry.

“But these are Indians, and the ladies are crying” he said.

“But nobody is in danger”, I said. “They can wait probably for an hour, may be a day even, but the water will come down eventually. If needed, we can get professional help, but there is no case for putting your life in ‘probable’ danger when nobody is in real danger”.

Babu was not too happy about it, but he concurred. We drove back, informed the fire service on our return, and nobody was hurt or injured in that event.

In this case the situation was clear. Nobody was in real danger and we had time on our side. But this is not always so.

Coming back to the Punalur-like situation, what should one do? Should you jump in and save your friend? Or should you stay back and watch your friend struggle to survive or die? In most drowning situations, there is certainly not enough time to seek “professional” rescue help (other than on beaches or swimming pools where lifeguards may be at work).

As a friend or relative, of course you have to go by your personal judgment on this. May be you would rather die trying to rescue your friend than having to live rest of your life with the guilt that you let him die in front of you. However, as a cold-blooded safety expert, I would say, don’t try to jump into the deep waters to save anybody, relative, friend, or stranger, unless you have a solid back-up system to ensure your own survival. This back-up system cannot be a third person who is willing to jump in, if you get into trouble, who is then backed up by a fourth, and so on. The back-up system has to be something that has a bit more predictability, e.g., a lifeline that connects you to the shore, a life-jacket, a floating aid, or a boat. If you do not have any of these back-up systems, if you jump into water to save somebody, you are just increasing the statistical chance of a disaster. The fact that you know swimming certainly improves your chance of survival and certainly will improve the chances of a rescue operation. However, you must remember that people, both you, as well as the victim you are trying to save, behave differently when panic-stricken. The fact that you can swim cross Manimala river with a person on your back as a part of a bet is no guarantee that you can rescue the same person from the middle of the river during a crisis. You are a much better friend if you anticipate this possibility before you come to a waterbody and take the measures which I will describe in following section. Having access to one long rope attached to an inflated tyre can save more lives in Kerala than all the “loving friends and relatives” willing to sacrifice their lives for their dear ones.

Unfortunately, this is not the lesson we are giving to our children. In fact, we do the opposite. As you know, in India we have a system by which children are awarded for their bravery as part of our Republic Day celebrations. Children, who showed exemplary bravery to save lives of others are selected from every state and brought to New Delhi as part of the Republic Day celebrations! If I understand correctly, they get to meet with the President of India, who distributes the awards and they are then put on top of an elephant and paraded through Delhi streets as part of the Republic Day parade. Naturally, this is a matter of great honor for the children and their families. This year, five children were selected from Kerala for this award and all five of them received the award for rescuing people from drowning. Now did any of these children had any back-up when they jumped in to save the victims? I don’t think so. Because if they had, then it would not have been such an act of bravery. While the individual cases of such rescues are indeed laudable, making heroes out of children who put their life at stake to save people from drowning sends wrong signals. Once again, I don’t have any statistics with me to prove it, but I can easily say that for every child atop the elephant in Delhi, there are at least two dead bodies in the mortuaries of a government hospital in Kerala. For every proud family beaming at the sight of children receiving bravery awards in Delhi there are more families grieving the loss of a life of their near ones who died trying to rescue others from drowning. We, of course, don’t hear their story. What we hear is that two children died in water or four children died in water. The correct advice to children is that it is not an appropriate action to jump for rescue without any additional support. By doing so, you put two lives in danger instead of one. If we follow this advice, individually, there will be situations where somebody could have been saved but statistically there will be more people alive.

Guard Your Children: I don’t know if I read more stories of children dying or the tragedies involving children stick to my mind. Two cases in the last two years come in a flash to my memory now. First, is the case of this young child, who was born to a 60+ year old lady in Ernakulam district that drowned in a bucket of water in their own house leaving the whole village grieving. Second, it is the case of a grandfather taking his grandsons (who were twins) during his evening walk and then not noticing them for a few minutes while he chatted with his friends. The children then went to play in a canal and were washed away. (I am referring to my memory and quoting news papers. There could be slight difference on these facts).

Water is a very dangerous place for children because unlike fire, which gives a warning of its danger from a distance, there is nothing intuitively dangerous about water. Worse, playing in water is easy (than let us say climbing on a tree, which is also dangerous) and more enjoyable (than, for example, playing on land). Children could therefore enter a water body without any fear only to meet with a tragic end. It is therefore important that elders first of all exercise utmost care with children to prevent situations where they could be exposed to a water related danger. As they grow up, parents should both explain the water-related dangers to children as well as prepare them to handle it by teaching them swimming and other safe practices related to water. Death of children in water is primarily due to lack of parental due diligence and is inexcusable. I understand the Government of Kerala now have a programme to teach school children how to swim. This is most positive. However, as part of this training, they should make it mandatory to teach them the rights rules of safety. In UK, safety professionals are taught “heroes die young”.

There is no safety in numbers: A number of deaths due to drowning happen in situations where a group of friends go into water to have a good time. As a person who grew up with lot of water around us and who still enjoys being in water, I am all in favor of people spending time swimming and playing in water. What is important is the correct assessment of the risks involved and taking the appropriate precautions. Often there is a “false security” of numbers, and people often push themselves beyond their individual comfort zone when in a group. This is what leads to tragedies. This can be easily prevented if only if we followed some very simple safety tips, such as:

1. You should always have a “buddy” with you whenever you enter a water body for recreation. If in a group, people should pair into group of two with one gauarding his buddy and vice versa. This is regardless of whether the water body is shallow or deep, still or flowing. This will ensure that there is somebody to help you or raise alarm should you get into trouble. There have been many cases when people went into a waterbody in a group and returned, only to realize an hour later that one in the group was missing. The buddy system would instantly half that risk.
2. You can only drown if the water level is above your nose. So long as you are in a static water body (pool or pond) and the water level in the pond/pool is below this level, you are OK (of course, this is not applicable if you are epileptic or you end up in water not on your own free will (e.g., thrown in, capsized boat, injured, drunk, etc.). Back home in Vengola, our family pond where I spent hundreds of enjoyable hours even as a child is very shallow and hence “child friendly”. The pond that I have created in my house in Perumbavoor, where I spend time with my children, is also shallow. One has to stand upside down to drown there.
3. If you are planning to enter a water body that is either flowing or exceeds your safe height, you should have access to a floating aid and/or a lifeline. Remember, improvised floating aids (floating logs, banana stem, inflated tyres, and plastic balls) are not entirely reliable by itself and shouldn’t be considered exclusive safety precaution. I remember the scene where my classmate died in his family pond, there was an improvised floating aid made with two coconuts being tied with a plastic rope. Such aids give you a false sense of security. However used in combination with all other good practices, a long rope tied to anything which floats (a buoy, inflated tyre, a ball, a log) available at the right time could save many lives. This is something which can be set up with minimal cost and carried around easily (for example a group going from Ernakulam to Paniyeli for watersports can easily bring them with a rope and an inflated tyre as safety back up).
4. You should also remember that commercially available floating aids (e.g., life jackets) are also not foolproof. If they are too small, they may not help you to float and if they are too big, a child could slip through it. It is therefore important that whichever floating aid you are planning to use, you test it. After all, your life depends on it.
5. You should never enter a water body when you are drunk. Drinking upsets your judgment and you will do stupid things that you normally don’t do. In many cases, where you hear stories of students who died in water, drinking and consequent excessive risky behavior is a factor
6. You should not go to the water body, other than a well-lit swimming pool, at night. This is primarily because darkness complicates judgment and makes rescue more difficult. In the most tragic case I know of, a couple on honeymoon decided to go for a swim at the hotel pool at night. Being in romantic mood, they undressed down to nothing; the guy climbed the diving platform and jumped headlong into, guess what, blue tiles on the floor—as the swimming pool was under repair and had no water! . Shesham Chinthyam !!
7. Always remember not to take risks beyond your comfort level. Being in a group or having a buddy who is the Olympic swimming champion with you does not guarantee your safety.

Sea is more than just water: I will cover the issue of safety in sea in two sections: (i) a recreational swim in the beach and (2) trips in the boat. In case of swimming in the beach, the key point to be remembered is that conventional wisdom about “water depth” is not applicable in the sea. Waves are very unpredictable and in one minute you could be in knee-deep water and the other water is flowing above your head. You could be swept down into the sea by returning waves, you could be thrown against the rocks on the beach by the waves, or you could be hit by a floating object in the wave. All these could injure you or cause your death. However, beach swimming isvery enjoyable and not something to be totally avoided. You just need to handle it with extra care. The following simple tips would help:
1. If at all possible, go to the beaches where there are official lifeguards on duty. While you reach there check out the cabin of the lifeguard and ensure that the guard is on duty and he has access to rescue material (life-buoy and lifeline). (This may not be the case often).
2. Always, without fail, follow the instruction of the lifeguard regarding where to swim and when to swim. It does not matter you have travelled 50 kilometers to reach the beach or you have been planning this for the last six months. The lifeguard knows the ground situation best.
3. Don’t swim in secluded areas where there are no people in the vicinity. If a part of the beach is secluded, probably there is a good reason for the same.
4. Always have a buddy when you go to the beach and one person should always be there on the land observing the sea while other(s) are in water. This will ensure that early warning is available about any approaching danger (high wave, debris, boats, etc.)
5. As in the case with other water bodies, don’t go when you are drunk or at night. You multiply your risk by doing so.
6. If you are going with children into the sea, don’t take the children all at once to the water.
7. Leave the water as soon as you are tired or you feel uncomfortable and certainly as soon as requested by the lifeguard on duty even if it appears that the water is calm and it is still bright.

A hundred years after Titanic: The number of people who die in boat accidents in Kerala compared to road accidents is comparatively less. However, people do die and often in large numbers (45 in the recent incident in Thekkady). Sometimes it is the fishermen in the sea and other times it is children in a country boat crossing a river.

To me, as a safety professional, it is really a tragedy that 100 years after the Titanic accident, people still die in dozens in boat accidents. It was established then that if adequate number of life boats and floating aids were available, more people would have survived that tragedy. A majority of these deaths (other than those trapped under water) could be prevented if only people were wearing a floating device (life jacket). In the case of Titanic, floating aids alone would not have saved people, as in cold waters one can die of hypothermia even if you were floating and not rescued quickly. So the rescue operation also has to be swift. However, in the sea, lakes, and backwaters of Kerala, if you have a floating aid with you, you will be safe for a day or two (even more). So even if the accident happened at night, you can still be picked up alive next day.

Yet we hardly see professional life jackets in Kerala. Country boats crossing Aluvappuzha everyday or during Sivarathri never have life jackets on them nor do professional fishermen who go to water every day. Sometime in the 1980s, when I was working at the National Environmental Engineering Research Institute and was made part of a survey team that frequently went for water sampling in rivers, I tried to buy a life jacket, searched all over India but to no avail. The thought that I had gone around almost all major rivers in India with no safety precautions at all now make me shudder. I still see researchers in Kerala going for river sampling without any personal protective equipment available to them. People are risking their lives every day, without even realizing that there are safer ways of going about their job..

If you value your life, don’t get into a boat in the lake, river, or sea, without having assured access to a personal life jacket that fits your size. A life jacket locked in the driver’s cabin or available on the shore does not guarantee any safety. If you are an occasional traveler (such as a tourist or visitor to the manappuram) and if you are not provided with a life jacket that suits your size, it is better to skip the boat journey. If you are a regular user of water transport, such as people in islands in kuttanad or fishermen, consider having your own life jacket. A good life jacket might cost you just twice as much as you would pay for an umbrella. An umbrella rarely saved your life but on a bad day the life jacket really will. Certainly, it is much cheaper than your life.

I want to conclude this article by talking about rescue operations during accidents in water. In professional emergency response, we have three terminologies rescue, relief and recovery but in Malayalam we often club this as “raskha pravarthanam”. This terminology is emotive and can cause additional injury or deaths as you will see.

I am mainly focusing on capsizing of a boat or a motor vehicle (car, bus, or train) landing up in water. It is common in Kerala that under such situations people in the shore gather immediately to help in the rescue operations. Dozens will plunge into the water to save people, hundreds more will be on the shore willing to help people to be moved to hospitals and thousands more will assemble in a matter of an hour. Fire and rescue services often arrive after hundreds of people are on the site and in water. In case of major accidents, there is always call for sending call out to the professional diving services of the Navy who are based in Kochi.

Having closely followed many accidents, including talking to victims, this community engagement is a mixed blessing. To begin with, community-based rescue is the only rapid and reliable rescue service we have, especially in situations where drowning can occur. As you know, in such a situation, people die in minutes and it does not help if we have most modern diving and rescue systems available with a helicopter in Kochi. Your survival essentially depends on the guy who happens to be on the shore, knows swimming and is willing to plunge into the water.

I have already indicated in the earlier part of the article that you should not jump into water, without adequate back- up, thus endangering your life too. Now I want to focus on something else. With the advent of number of TV channels, including very local channels, we start to see water “rescue” images coming out within an hour after the boat has capsized or bus has plunged into the water. You continue to see untrained and unprotected volunteers in water diving to “rescue” the victims. You hear heroic stories about local people who plunged to water again and again to save victims. In Kottayam, it was reported that one of the rescue worked even died due to exhaustion. You also hear newspaper articles about firemen who did not jump into water to save people and peoples ire at the same. You often see JCBs being used, with ropes attached, to pull out the vehicles that were involved in the accident. You see floodlights being brought to the sight so that “raksha pravarthanam” can continue during the night. You hear complaints that the naval rescue helicopters could not land in a ground in Kottayam as the place was full of rubbish left after a meeting held the previous night.

I want you to realize that in an accident involving people drowning, the scope of “rescue” is over in a short time. Unlike earthquakes or road accidents where survivors could be pulled out alive days and even weeks after the event, when somebody is in a drowning situation, if you do not save a person who is underwater for few minutes, it is over. So normally there is no scope for “rescue” operation after say 10 minutes, with exceptional cases in cold countries reported of upto 66 minutes. In very rare cares, where a vehicle, boat, bus, or train, has capsized but not fully submberged, there is a theoretical chance that somebody is trapped with an airspace for bit longer. This, again, we should be able to guage in one minute. So the basic is clear then. Beyond the first hour, at best, there is no room for “rescue” operation in a drowning situation. Therefore, there is no need for any community volunteers or fire service officials to put their life at risk beyond this point for “rescue” operations because there will be no lives left to save.

What is left is relief and recovery operations. Firstly, we have relief operations. People who have been rescued from the water need to be given first aid, families need to be assisted to trace their near ones, contact their families and deal with the trauma, and the victims need to be taken to hospitals for professional medical care. All these need to be done. But remember, all these are shore-based activities and nobody needs to put their life at danger.

Then we have recovery operations. Firstly, we need to recover dead bodies, if any, of unaccounted people. Secondly, we need to recover the belongings of the people who were in the boat or vehicle. Finally, we need to recover the vehicle itself. Remember, none of the above is time critical and there is no reason why anybody’s life should be put in possible danger during recovery operations. This means that we need not try to use the first available JCB, with untrained driver, unrated ropes, and unfamiliar terrain, to pull out a bus. We need not set up floodlights at night using unsafe electrical wires running from the local electricity pole or nearby house to recover the vehicle at night. This means we should not push the firemen to jump into the water to look if there are further dead bodies trapped in the car.

Due to the nature of our geographical terrain and state of our rescue and relief operations, we will continue to need community participation in the initial two steps. What we need to do it to train and equip them better. I will write about that another day. However, when it comes to recovery operations, it is best to leave the community volunteers out. Professionals should come in, evaluate the nature of rescue operations that are involved, identify the resources needed, plan the operations, look at the safety risks associated with the planned activities, and only when all the required resources are in place should rescue operations begin. If it begins, in day light, after 48 hours, that is fine. Yes, it will be traumatic for the families who still have people missing,, but if our objective is to prevent avoidable deaths, then we should not put anybody else’s life at risk when there are no more lives are there that can be saved.

Tags: mathrubhumi, safety, water

Followiing a spate of tragic accidents, Mathrubhumi asked me if I could write an article with guidance on road safety. The resulting article is now online on Mathrubhumi.

http://www.mathrubhumi.com/story.php?id=109020

I was very inspired by the tremendous response to this article (enthoru response, ellam positive, as one of the news paper ad says). I had 600 hits on my website in one day !! (the cumulative number till then being 800 for few months.

I am therefore tempted to write few more articles.

Watch this spece

http://www.mathrubhumi.com/english/news.php?id=93777

Have a look

Surviving the roads in Kerala

Muralee Thummarukudy

A recent article in the International Herald Tribune stated that India has overtaken China as the country with maximum number of road traffic fatalities. As per the report, more than 120,000 people die per year in the roads in India. This is despite the fact that China has more people and more vehicles. This is certainly not one area where we wanted to overtake China but we actually have.

As per the records on the website of Kerala Police (http://www.keralapolice.org), there were 36,433 accidents in 2009 leading to 3,773 deaths and 41,455 injuries. This translate to about 10 deaths per day and a death rate of 11/100,000 population. For comparison, in the United Kingdom, a place with lot more people and vehicles, it is about 5.5/100,000. It is obvious that far too many people are dying on our roads.

In the famous Sherlock Holmes story, ‘The Adventure of the Second Stain’, there is a very interesting exchange between Holmes and Lord Bellinger, the Prime Minister of UK.
‘Mr. Holmes, you are in full possession of the facts. What course do you recommend?’
Holmes shook his head mournfully.
‘You think, sir, that unless this document is recovered, there will be war?’
‘I think it is very probable.’
‘Then, sir, prepare for war.’ Mr Holmes said.
It is true that the road accidents in Kerala have reached crisis proportions that need urgent action at all levels. We are all in full possession of facts. The question is what do we do about it ?.

Of course nobody in Kerala needs these statistics to be convinced about the issue at hand. Not a day passes without the news of number of people dying on the roads, often multiple fatalities. All deaths are tragic, but sometime it is heartbreaking such as one recent incident where two young children, who were returning from the airport after having seen off their mother, died when their vehicle plunged into a river (they died along with two others). You don’t even need to read newspapers to be sensitized to the issue., I lost two relatives in the last 10 years in two separate accidents in my village, both causing emotional sorrow and practical difficulties for the close relatives. I don’t know if there is anybody in Kerala who has not lost a friend or relative in the last 10 years in a traffic accident.

Deaths are often the most reported and discussed consequences of traffic accidents, but that is just one part. Statistically, for every death, probably there are two people who are alive with lifelong disabilities and may be ten times as many with temporary disruptions. Add up the medical, legal, and social costs of such accidents, you can see the gravity of the problem.

Kerala is not a place where there is any lack of awareness among people as to what the causes of these accidents are or, for that matter, what the solutions are. Start any discussion in a coffee shop and you can hear all the problems�the increasing number of vehicles, poor state of roads, bad driving practices, drinking and driving, etc. It is all known and the same people can also clearly articulate the solutions. Improved compliance of traffic rules being the first, better roads, no use of mobile phones, and so on. Government policies and stricter enforcements are often cited as priority solutions and actually they are!!

Since both the problems and solutions are known to all, and changing many of these are not within the ability of the individual drivers, I will focus on what you, as an individual, can do to survive this situation while improvements in road, lighting in the road, drunk driving and compliance with road regulations etc will bring lasting change in the situation. This does not imply that we need no action at the policy or enforcement levels, but that is not the focus of today’s article. You have a duty of taking care of yourself and your family. This article is about how you can fulfill this.

In a book which I read long back, as the heroine is about to die of cancer, her husband/boy friend is feeling timid to start any discussions. So to break the ice, she tell her husband/boy friend ‘let us talk about the funeral arrangements, so that everything else we speak will be an improvement’. So let me start with the worst and, trust me, things will look better as the article progresses.

As per statistics, the chances that you will have an accident on our roads are very high and that you may die is also not insignificant. So, before you enter the road, prepare for that eventuality. I know this is not a nice thing to say or not even a popular thing to say. But it may be that I witness too many deaths these days or it may be that I had to deal very closely in some cases where death happened all too suddenly and the family was completely ruined due to lack of preparation. Remember, nobody who died on the roads in Kerala yesterday got up yesterday morning and thought that ‘this is my last day’. So, an accident could catch you or me anytime, anywhere. There is no running away from it. In fact every morning we are driving towards it.

In my opinion, you need to do three basic things if you live in Kerala whether you drive or not. First, write your will. In far too many families, including where people die of natural causes when they are 80+, they leave no will behind. Families sometime don’t even know what are the assets and liabilities of the deceased. If you care for your family, please write a will and update it every year so that in the unfortunate case something happens to you, they have access to your resources and don’t have to fight over your assets.

Secondly, take a good life insurance. Well, I am not an insurance agent but an agent for an insurance policy. I have seen far too many families dropping from a middle class existence (or even upper middle class existence) down to survival mode. Deaths happens all too sudden, and compensation, if any and always insufficient, takes years to materialize. Once again, if you care for your family, be protected.

Third, possess good medical insurance. The culture of health insurance is not very well developed in India but there are some schemes now available. Far too many families are bankrupt by the cost of medical treatment of accident victims. The number of cases where hospitals seek hefty advance payment for handling serious accident victims is on the rise. There is nothing sadder than having to live with a feeling that you could not provide the best possible medical treatment to your loved ones or better treatment may have saved their lives. So, for your own sake and that of your family, possess medical insurance.

Once the basics are in place, let us then work on your driving skills. If you have got a driving license in India, you know as a fact that you really were not prepared to drive on the road safely when you got the license. Our driving schools consider getting you a driving license the key responsibility more than teaching you how to drive safely. Naturally, the driving schools are not going to change their behavior. As soon as they feel you are fit enough to be presented to the inspectors for a driving test, they will do so as they mostly work on ‘lumpsum’ fee (eg. Rs 8000 to get you the license). Driving training is often done during non-rush hours, away from the town and always in good weather. If it rains, the instructor will suggest postponement of the session to another day. However, driving in the traffic, in the rain, at night, and in the rush hours (or combination of the above) is lot different than just moving around the vehicle in a football ground. Within the prevailing context of the Kerala driving school culture, my recommendation is for you to arrange for private lessons with experienced drivers, before or after you have obtained license, for driving practice in ‘real life’ situations. I know Maruti in Kochi has a special training for city driving, but I am sure you can design a course for yourself and you should.

In the past, cars used for driving training were often old and even if the driving schools did not planned to, there were situations where it broke down and the students had to observe the ‘asan’ sorting it out. However, these days for most people who learn driving car is a blackbox and they rarely understand the car, what is inside the bonnet (or boot for Tata Nano), how to read the dials and how to listen to your car (with AC and music the listening is more or less gone completely). However, if you plan to be a safe driver, spend a day with a good mechanic and understand the basics. You don’t need to be able to fix anything but you need to understand when something is wrong about the vehicle.

So you have a license, you know how to look after the vehicle and the question is what you should buy ?. I am talking about vehicle for personal transport, so we are essentially discussing two-wheelers or cars. I don’t have a statistical basis to say if two-wheelers cause more accidents/deaths than cars, though people seems to believe so. But let me make this observation. Within the roads in Kerala, there is a food chain of vehicles. Bigger vehicles don’t acknowledge the existence of the smaller ones. So a big truck or bus will drive as if there is no other vehicle in the road and it is for the cars, autos, and two-wheelers to maneuver to safety. Similarly car drivers assume there are no autos or two-wheelers. So like in any ecosystem, the creature who is at bottom of the food chain (two-wheelers) is most vulnerable.

My recommendation will be to limit the use of two-wheelers to roads where the traffic is not fast or heavy. Essentially for short-distance drives, city or rural. Last month I read that a girl on a scooter was killed 130 km away from her house. Taking your two-wheeler to the national highways for a long-distance drive is a sure call for trouble.

My second recommendation regarding purchasing of a vehicle is that when you consider the factors regarding the vehicle, look at safety features closely. Seat belts, of course, are now universal and mandatory, but check if they have seat belts in the back seat too. Airbags, side-impact protect systems, and antilock braking system (ABS), all provide the ‘margin between life and death’ on the random day when you need it most. Buy the safest vehicle within the range you are looking for.

When you have a vehicle, old or new, it is absolutely essential that you have both the maintenance record and the official record of the vehicle current. It is no use having a very safe vehicle if the tyres have been overused or brake oil has run low. There is nothing more tragic than finding out after an accident that your registration and/or the insurance has expired. In addition to all the health and financial problems, you really don’t need a legal problem on your hand after an accident.

Now you have a car in good condition, all papers ready, and you have learned to drive well. So let me move to planning your journey. One the natural things you do when you have your own vehicle is that you start to travel more and at a time of your choice. You may wish to visit your uncle on a random thought and you may decide to stay over for dinner though you did not originally plan it that way. Of course, this is the flexibility that you always wanted. However, you should always remember that the longer you are on the road, the higher are your chances of having an accident. In the corporate world where I learnt much about safety, we used to say ‘You can’t have a road accident if you don’t start the journey’. This still has some relevance in Kerala. Basically, it prompts people to think twice before deciding whether the particular journey they are about to undertake is necessary at all. I would rate the trips that people make to airports to receive and see off friends and relatives as a category that is entirely avoidable. It is a common sight across airports in Kerala to see tens of thousands of people who crowd at the arrival and departure gates having come to receive or see off their relatives. It is also routine to read in newspapers of people having died in car accidents on their returning from the airport. While the eagerness of friends and family members to meet the loved ones at the arrival gate and see them off at the last minute is entirely understandable, it is much better to have such receptions and see-offs at your house with only one person traveling to the airport to see off or receive.

I will now discuss another matter relating to safety, which, in Kerala, is almost unheard of but is routine and mandatory in developed countries. I am talking about child safety seats. The image of a happy young family in Kerala is the one where the husband is driving the car, wife is sitting in the front seat holding the child. It takes less than a minute for this happy picture to turn otherwise. One abrupt turn, one sudden brake, the child could fly out from the mother’s arms (god forbid!!), hit the windscreen, and the rest is imaginable.

In all developed countries, it is mandatory that children are put in specially designed safety seats from the very first day. This safety seats should only be fixed in the backseat of the car. This is mandatory up to the age of 12 in some countries (other countries have lower age and relaxation based on height). In most countries, children below the age of 12 are not allowed to sit in the front seat, a matter of eternal argument between me and my son. If an accident occurs where the child is harmed but was found to be not protected, parents are prosecuted for negligence. And why not? While the grown-ups can certainly argue whether to wear seatbelts or helmets, decide to use mobile phones and behave irresponsibly while driving, and suffer the legal and practical consequences themselves, they have no right to put the life and welfare of the children at risk. I don’t know how many children die or get injured per year in Kerala, but anyway this is no reason why child seats should not be made mandatory.

As I mentioned, people in Kerala are increasingly using seat belts these days. There is better enforcement of this too. Initial inertia pertaining to ‘too cumbersome’, arguments such as ‘you cannot get out fast if you had an accident’, etc., are fading. Now is the time to go for the final act�seat belts in the rear seats. Though cars are provided with seat belts in the rear seats and such seat belts save lives as much as they do in the front (remember Princess Diana was in the rear seat and it is widely speculated that seat belts would have saved her life) we often do not use the seat belts in the rear seat (as the police will not catch us). The first time I was caught without wearing seatbelts (in 1999, in Oman, by our managing director), I told him ‘I am sorry’. He said ‘why say sorry to me, you would be really sorry if you had an accident’. So your responsibility is not to the state or to the police but to you and your own family. Keep that in mind at all times.

Let me come to another question related to driving the family car. Who should drive your car�you, your wife, your son, your cousin, or a driver, assuming, of course, that all of them have a license and is allowed to drive your car (by the insurance company). Under no situation allow anybody who don’t have a valid Indian driving license (be it your minor age children or your cousin who has been driving abroad for decades) to drive your car. My take is that whoever is the most experienced and is in the best mental and physical condition to drive the car safely should drive the car. This means that father doesn’t drive the car if he’s had a drink at the party. Remember, while there may be legally acceptable limits for alcohol and, in any case, testing is so rare that you are unlikely to be stopped during short drives, there is technically no safe level of alcohol. Any amount of alcohol will impair your judgment and increase the chance of an accident. So don’t drink yourself and don’t get into a car where you think or know the driver is drunk.

There are few situations where people driving the car should ask themselves if they should indeed be driving. The first of the situation is when you are angry. Let us take the classical situation where the husband and wife have just had a quarrel, probably regarding the journey itself and the whole atmosphere in the car is foul. It is best for the husband or wife not to drive in such a situation and if at all they agree to go, get a professional driver or a taxi. The rule by extension also implies that you (be it driver or passenger) should not start an argument while in the journey regardless of the provocation. The second is a situation when there is an emergency and you have to rush, be it taking a sick child to the hospital or rushing to hospital having received news about an accident of a close friend. In both situations, regardless of your skill otherwise as a driver, it is best not to drive yourself. Get somebody else or get a taxi.

An unfit condition for driving can also occur even if you are happy. Let us take the example of a family on a pilgrimage to Guruvayoor. Let us assume this family is from Trivandrum. You start on a Saturday mid-morning, reach Guruvayoor by evening, go to the temple and sleep for a few hours. You wake up at 1 PM to be ready to be at the queue for nirmalyam, and by 5 30 you finish your darshan. You have your breakfast, check out from the hotel, and return to Trivandrum. En route, you stop at Vytilla and have a good meal and continue the journey. Everybody in the car is happy. Wife is happy to have been to the temple, kids are happy about the outing and the hotels, and you are pleased that everybody is so happy. Of course, you don’t notice that you have been driving for many hours and you haven’t had a good night’s rest. The combination of good mood, good food, and fatigue can put you to momentary sleep and in the national highway, it is all that is required to veer you away from your track or fail to notice that the truck in front of you has stopped moving. Best thing to do?, Go by train or get a driver. Of course, it is no good if your driver has been in the queue for nirmalyam too or is not rested properly. I will come to how you look after your driver in the following section.

I have explained you situations where you should opt for a professional driver or a taxi. When you decide to either hire a taxi or driver, safety, in addition to security, should be your primary concern. It is tempting to get a driver who is ‘street smart’, who can cut through miles of traffic jam but statistically you are putting yourself in great danger. Baby chettan, whose car I hire every time I am in India and has been for past 10 years is the best example of a safe driver. He never drives past the driving limits, often far below it, never breaks a rule, and will never attempt to jump the queue in a traffic jam. Yes, when you have a presentation or court appointment, it is often frustrating. It feels terrible to take 8 hours for a 200 km journey from Perumbavoor to Trivandrum and one prays for express highways, I still go with Baby chettan. I factor his driving habit in and in the last ten years, I haven’t even experienced a ‘sudden brake’ sitting in his car.

It is not just good enough that you get a safe driver, you must also look after your driver. Recently, when Baby chettan was not available, I took another car and the driver turned out to be very knowledgeable about safety and environmental matters. He said, ‘do you know much petrol can be saved if only our hotels had some facility for drivers to sleep?’. In the absence of such facilities and due to presence of mosquitoes in almost all towns, drivers are forced to sleep inside their car with the AC on all through the night. He is right. Most hotels in Kerala don’t have facility for drivers and most people are not considerate enough to book an extra room for the drivers. Result, you have a badly rested driver in the best case. You have a badly rested and an annoyed driver in the worst.

We often hear about accidents with multiple fatalities at night or early morning. Many of these are people returning from long drives, be it from airports, excursions or pilgrimage. The main culprit here is the duration of the journey and the amount of rest the driver gets. For example, if there is an airport trip from Thiruvalla to Kochi at 8 PM at night, we rarely check if the driver was taking rest during the day or was working/driving as usual and taking the night driving as overtime. Imagine somebody, a professional driver or your relative, who started his day as usual on the morning, continued till say 7 PM, then had dinner and started drive to the airport for three hours and then make the return journey. By the time he would normally finish the journey at say 6 AM in the morning, he was working for 20 hours. Our body is not designed to have that type of stamina and our attention does go down. If you are planning to go for a night drive, take rest during the day. If you are calling a taxi for a night drive, tell him in advance and insist that he takes rest during the day.

A more common but worst situation is when people substitute a car to save money on hotel accommodation. Far too often people hire a taxi, fill it with more passengers than what is comfortable, and start the journey at night and travel all the way to Ooty, Palani, or Velankanni. The passengers all sleep at night without bothering to check if the driver is tired, feeling sleepy, or even taking a break during long drives. They then arrive at the location, often take hotel rooms (not bothering to check if the driver requires the same facility for retiring or other primary needs), get ready in a few hours (as they were well rested the night before), and get the driver to drive through the day. After a day or few days, they return back at night following the same logic and routine. In the worst cases, they even have a ‘drink’ with the driver to keep him in good spirits. We are then surprised, saddened, and shocked when we hear of a family of 4 or 6 being killed while returning from Kodaikanal or Velankanny, often at night.

No driver should be allowed to drive for more than three hours in one stretch. No driver should work for more than 12 hours a day. Night driving should be avoided if at all possible and, certainly, should not be substituted for hotel rooms. The driver, if not your friend or relative, should be given a separate room to rest while on tours. In no case should you allow your driver to drink alcohol either with you or alone. Somebody should always be awake in the car keeping an eye on the road and the driver ensuring that the driver is not fatigued and takes regular breaks, minimum 15 minutes every three hours. This might take a bit more money and bit more time. But then, how much is your life worth?

It is illegal in Kerala to use mobile phones while driving. The fine is comparatively hefty, Rs. 1000 per offence. I am not sure if there is any difference for repeat offenders. However, you see people using mobile phones while driving all the time. People who are bit more careful use speaker phone or hands-free provisions. International studies indicate that it is not so much the fact that your hands are engaged which is causing accident but the fact that your mind is engaged. So using hands-free really doesn’t help. When you are driving, just don’t take the call. If there is somebody else in the car, ask them to attend the call and offer to call back. If you are driving alone, unless you are expecting an important call or on a long drive, wait till you finish the journey to take the call. Ninety-nine per cent of the calls you receive are not that important that you have to risk your life to attend the same. If you are expecting an urgent call, stop the car safely and then take the call. For the same reasons, don’t try to check stuff in the dashboard, close a loose door, or change the CD while you are driving. You may not realize it, but trust me; it really doesn’t need a lot of time to have a fatal accident.

In the paragraphs above, I have tried to give you some principles of defensive driving where in we factor in the ‘external’ world as it is and maximize our own chances of survival. There are lot more techniques of defensive driving, regarding driving practices itself. But I will leave that for another day.

Meanwhile, stay safe.

Muralee Thummarukudy is Emergency Management Expert with over 15 years of experience in Industry and United Nations. Muralee frequently blogs about safety issues at http://www.muraleethummarukudy.com

Tags: mathrubhumi, roads, safety, survival

I came across this this humour post on love of engineering college student on an internet forum and that reminded me of a true love story which happened in MACE.

I will have to leave the name and the batch of the individuals involved out to protect their privacy but will say that this happened in the 1980s.

As you know, those days in engineering colleges the 4 year degree course took five years. Girls always wore a sari to the college. These two information are important to the story. For any of my audience, who is not from India, it is also important to realise that in our culture most of us do not find our spouses and boys (or girls) expressing their affection to those in the opposite sex (or same sex) is not treated kindly.

It was within this social context that we had our story.

So there was this boy and girl, in the same class studying together for five years. The boy felt an attraction for the girl at some point of time (he says it was love at first sight, but we don’t know for sure) but like boys in teen age was not confident to reveal it or express it to the girl or to his colleagues.

And time passed.

At last the time came for them to complete the course and in one desperate moment, he told his close friend that “I like this girl Ms X” but I don’t want to ask her” (for fear of being rejected etc).

It was this confident friend of his, who revealed this story to me many years later, who then catalysed the love.

He took the matter to a girl who was a close friend of Ms X. And together they agreed that this girl will talk to Ms X and if Ms X is indeed happy to reciprocate the love, she will wear a green sari for the final year get together.

And then ?

The story spread, as they often do in college campuses and there was tension in the air as girls arrived, en masse, as girls often did those days.

And guess what ?,

She wore a green sari, but no words were spoken.

After the final year get together, they all left and what was left was the exams.

And on the first day of exam she wore a green sari

and on the second day of exam she wore a green sari

and on the third too

and on the fourth too

and on the fifth too

and on the sixth too

and on on the seventh exam too she wore a green sari

Finally, on the day of the viva too she wore a green sari.

By then, her wardrobe was overflowing with green saris

However, she never spoke to the boy all through this period

I think she was telling “idiot, why did it take you all of 5 years to tell me this”

I am not sure if she had actually read O Henry or at least seen Yathra of Balu Mahendra, but I think when it comes to love, girls are more instinctive than boys

This love story had a happy ending

They got married within an year of graduation

And when I heard from them last, they were still happily married and settled in Mumbai

Her wardrobe is still full of green saris…