Multi level troubles for head-less gear

Its a win-win situation for women in Delhi as the High Court has made helmet optional for them keeping their safety aside.

When the State government is finding it impossible to curb the number of road accidents by two-wheelers every day, there are number of debates that have cropped up.

The Delhi Government on February 29 told the Delhi High Court that helmets could not be made compulsory for women driving two-wheelers or riding pillion.

The government also urged the High Court to dismiss a PIL that demanded helmets to be made compulsory for both the genders. Thousands of two-wheeler riders are killed on everyday basis and the government instead of coming out with a logical result, is mired by many sets of laws for helmets alone.

One of them is Rule 115 of Delhi Motor Vehicles Rules - under which it made helmets optional for women in Delhi while another rule, given in section 129 of the Motor Vehicles Act applicable all over India makes it mandatory for all two-wheeler riders to wear helmets!

While two-wheelers remain India’s favourite mode of transport, accounting for 75 per cent of all vehicles sold in the country, the State government has failed to finding a common solution for it. “I wear my helmet when I ride my scooty. I don’t care about my hair style like other girls who don’t wear helmets just because their hair will be ruined.

It is safety for me first and then styling,” said Reema Kaur, a film student of Sri Aurobindo Institute for Arts and Communications. On the contrary, Tulika Nandi, a student of Deshbandhu College, says: “I don’t like wearing helmets. I sweat all over my head when I wear it and find it most uncomfortable. I am glad that donning helmets is not compulsory for girls in Delhi.”

Even as the debate on to wear or not rages on, the government has added another stipulation. Inferior quality helmets are being treated as riding without helmets from March 01. According to this, the traffic police will crack down on two-wheeler riders wearing helmets without the ISI mark and fine them according to provisions of the Motor Vehicle Act.

“We boys are always on the receiving end. Be it wearing helmets or not wearing them,” grumbles Kaushik Nath, an enterpreneur dealing in export-import. The motives behind this drive are the safety of riders and the other is to root out the rapidly increasing helmet vendors selling inferior quality helmets on pavements and roadsides at cheap rates.

Enforcement of road safety measures is a huge problem in India, which leads to one road accident every minute and a road accident death every four minutes, but in a country with so many concerns, everyone except the riders and their drivers seem to be bothered by the hullabaloo surrounding headgear.