The truckers’ protest is far from over

When truckers stop work, those who have no inkling of the ground realities see the strikes as overblown temper tantrums. But what is their reality?

It took just two days to bring a country to its knees. To outward appearances, the truckers’ strike was ‘planned’ action, hitting the supply of essentials like fuel and produce.

But in reality, it was plain desperation and a rare moment of unified action when truckers ceased working on January 1. The strike that petered out as quickly as it began was a spontaneous reaction to what truck drivers quickly dubbed the “kala kanoon” for 'hit-and-run' incidents. And now, truck drivers in Karnataka are on strike again, this time indefinite, from January 17, onwards.

When truckers stop work, those who have no inkling of the ground realities see the strikes as overblown temper tantrums. Do truckers want to have an all-season pass to mow down whoever they wanted on the roads with no consequences? There is also the moral condemnation about “running away” after seriously injuring or killing someone.

As per the government, the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita, has two distinct categories for “causing death by negligence.” Causing death through a rash or negligent act (not amounting to culpable homicide) will see offenders face imprisonment for a maximum of five years and/or a fine. Furthermore, it would be a bailable offense.

The subsequent category addresses drivers accidently causing death through rash and negligent driving (not amounting to culpable homicide) but failing to report the accident to a police officer or magistrate. In such a scenario, they’d be liable for up to 10 years of imprisonment or a fine of Rs 7 lakh. Furthermore, such “hit-and-run” cases would be considered "non-bailable".

The Central government has tried to reassure the truckers that as long as they go to the police or take the injured to a hospital, there is no reason to fear the punitive consequences of the second category.

Indian road realities

The harsh law seems to have been formulated in response to a steep rise in road accidents in the recent past. A total of 4,61,312 road accidents occured in 2022, claiming 1,68,491 lives, while another 4,43,366 people were injured. 

This means, on average, the country sees 53 crashes and 19 deaths every hour, according to the ‘Road accidents in India - 2022’ report. 

Over half of all road fatalities took place on national and state highways — though they make up less than 5 per cent of India's total road network. Steering the biggest vehicles on said highways, truckers and bus drivers are often targeted whether they are at fault or not.

For aghast truck drivers, the stricture that they ‘only’ have to report the accident to avoid getting arrested for a non-bailable offense is the new Damocles sword in the profession.

Sachin Pandey, a veteran driver who has been driving trucks for most of his adult life, points out the immediate practical difficulties of what the new law is asking them to do. 

“When there is an accident, you will run because you don’t want to be killed by the mob of locals. Saving your own life from lynching becomes the priority. Then, you have to find the nearest police station," he says.

"We usually don’t know the area. We will take lifts on tractors or bullock carts or walk because we have abandoned our truck to get to the station. We will go to one station and be told to go to another because it is not the right jurisdiction. It could take 12 to 24 hours as we are strangers there. By then, the area’s police may already have registered an FIR as someone (local) has informed them. By then, the driver is already a wanted man ‘on the run’. The accident may not be the truck driver’s fault but he’s still a criminal because the penal code will be applied as he didn’t report. Who still wants to be a truck driver if such a law is implemented?”

Strangers in a strange land

Yogita Raghuvanshi, one of the few female drivers in the industry, has a unique perspective on the situation. Before she joined the industry herself, she too saw truckers as reckless drivers. Then she was hit by the realities of the road when she began driving.

She relates an incident when she was driving through Kerala and a car hit her from the left. Yogita stopped the truck on the side of road, took pictures of the graze marks on her truck and the car that clearly proved that the car was trying to overtake her truck from the wrong side.

"The car driver was also a woman. We went to the police station. She spoke in Malayalam, the police's local language, and she was also the wife of an IAS officer. Meanwhile, I only spoke in Hindi and was only a truck driver. Who did you think the police listened to?" she asks, laying out the practicalities of 'reporting to the police' in a strange area.

Underlining how the dynamics of class, language barriers, local vs outsider and of course, big vehicles vs small cars plays out, Yogita says it reporting to the police, even when the truck driver is not at fault, is not a guarantee of justice.

"Most of us practice lane driving. But smaller vehicles — four wheelers, two wheelers — they will try to overtake from the left, from the right and at high speeds. Then when an accident happens, we get blamed because we are the bigger vehicle," she remarks.

It also doesn't take long for things to go very bad. "I have seen locals light a truck on fire, burning the driver with it. I have seen a driver jump off a bridge to escape a mob lynching," she claims. A severe mob beating or violent death of the truck driver is not the exception but the norm when a truck is in any way involved in an accident on India's highways, she asserts.

The ‘badi gaadi’ conundrum

Her account is verified by Pandey, who points out that most trucks drive at speeds between 35 to 45 km/hour on normal highways where it is impossible to pick up speed in a truck with 6 to 8 gear shifts for top speeds of around 70 km/hr. 

It is only on express highways that trucks can raise their speed to 60-70 km/hour. 

"It also depends on how heavy our load is. It takes time to pick up speed and time for a truck to halt when you brake while driving a heavy vehicle," he claims. 

Unlike cars or two-wheelers that can go from 0 to 100 kmph in a few seconds, with small vehicles often driving at above 80 kmph speeds, driving a truck is a different proposition altogether. What is more, it is truck drivers who are wary of the smaller vehicles who ‘race’ them. There are some very good reasons for this.

Truck drivers have to contend with blind spots as the driver ‘sits’ above the traffic in the truck’s cabin. There aren't enough mirrors or cameras to give a truck driver a full 360 degree perspective of surrounding traffic lower to the ground.

It is almost impossible to avoid smaller vehicles, pedestrians and even animals skirting too close, too quickly. "Even if I brake on time, the truck has its own momentum. It takes a while to halt. So if a car in front of a truck halts too suddenly, there is a likelihood the truck could hit the car from the back,” explains Pandey. 

He explains that if he tries to swerve, chances are the loaded vehicle will topple or the truck will spin out of control, possibly smashing into the road divider.

Pandey also rues how even though it is the private cars and bikes driving like they are “racers”, it is the hapless truck driver who gets blamed.

Driver shortage

There is also the matter of training. Most truck drivers come from agricultural families, taking up work off season or to supplement the family’s income.

“Sometimes the third brother will take it [truck driving] up,” says Pandey. In India, truck drivers are, by and large, not ‘professional’ truck drivers. They typically learn how to drive from another relative or a friend. Experience in driving comes after years of trucking and is a hard-learnt skill and the early years are prone to mistakes. 

Pandey informs me that the only trucking school he knows of is the Ashok Leyland’s Driver Training Institute (DTI) in Chhindwara, Madhya Pradesh. There are other branches like Namakkal (Tamil Nadu), Burari (Delhi), Kaithal (Haryana), Rajasamand (Rajasthan) and Bhubaneswar (Orissa), among others, run under the private-public-partnership model. But it is a drop in the ocean when it comes to training the number of professional drivers needed in what is rapidly becoming a stigmatised profession.

Pandey is forthright, “No truck driver wants his son to be a truck driver. No one wants to marry their daughters off to a trucker. Who would want to marry someone who is constantly on the road and never at home …who might sleep around, or are addicts to beat the rigors of the road?” 

Freight prices keep dropping. So while earlier, truck drivers could afford to keep a helper apprentice, now, the income from one truck is no longer sufficient to do so. It is precarious living where the risks are increasingly seeming unsustainable and there is no new generation of truck drivers being trained.

Increasingly, it is untrained, newbie drivers taking the wheel with not much mentorship to boast of.

A woman driver holds a placard during the Transport Unions’ protest against the new penal law on hit-and-run cases, at Jantar Mantar, in New Delhi, Wednesday, Jan. 3, 2024.

Highway pirates

The respect due or “aukat” has come up in the truckers’ protest. And it is something the drivers themselves feel keenly as not much respect comes their way when they are dealing with hostile police, entitled small vehicle drivers, thieving locals and hired goons of political bigwigs looking for their cut as goods make way through their states. 

The driver of a truck, flush with cash and goods is a vulnerable target on the highways — he is a target that can be looted.

Ramesh Kumar, a Drivers’ Relationship consultant, has driven alongside many truckers and shared their worries. “Most of them can’t sleep a wink even when they stop the truck at halts. They are scared someone will steal their fuel, their tyres, or their goods. Locals will lynch a driver because they know he has money …they can steal his mobile phone or they’ll loot his truck.”   

Truckers typically carry money to not just pay for fuel or other journey-related expenses, but also to pay official and unofficial “tolls” when they cross borders. They have to be ready to pay off RTO officials or local goons of political bigwigs as they pass through their areas. They are a moving but vulnerable target for these ‘pirates’ of the highway. Off-the-book tolls and bribes collected in this way, according to one expert estimate is around Rs 8000 crores a month, though systems like FasTag and eWay bills have helped reduced this drain. Transporters have to budget for this despite it being illegal even as GST has, in most cases, eliminated the need for state-based toll collected at borders.

Truckers, therefore, prefer to travel at night when there is less traffic and less chances of running into money-grabbing opportunists. “They get messages. Someone up ahead will relay, ‘there is a pack of dogs ahead’ — dogs being the codeword for RTO officials out to make a quick buck or the local MLA’s goons. The driver will wait on the side of the road, till he gets the all clear. And then he will move again."

To still maintain time, despite these unscheduled stops and starts, drivers will speed through the night to get their loads to the destination on time. Reaching on time or before time means they will get an "inam" - extra money to supplement their meagre monthly salaries of about Rs 10,000 or so. They will bulk up with side hustles — everything from overloading trucks to selling fuel saved on a trip to winning “prize money” for arriving extra early. 

But speeding at night also means dealing with poor visibility, sleep deprivation and accidents.

On an average, Kumar says drivers will get 3 to 4 hours of sleep on a trip after driving for 12 to 16 hours but they won’t sleep properly as they are constantly on alert. “There are no proper facilities. To rest, shower, or change clothes,” says Kumar. 

Drivers sleep in their truck cabins to avoid getting robbed. Only sometimes will they find the rare private facility that provides them with a safe area to park their truck and get some proper shut eye. Sleep deprivation is common and the norm for long haul truckers. 

And yet, despite this all, it is the truckers who make good on promises of ecom sites promising same day ‘rush’ delivery and other equally tight timelines on essentials that keep the country running.

“From Nasik to Kolkata, it is about 1800 kms. Truckers will drive through the night and reach before the fastest train on that route. Without trucks, where would this country be?” asks Pandey in a seemingly rhetorical question. 

Amritlal Madan, currently the president of All India Motor Transport Congress (AIMTC), says the government has “assured” them that the law will not be enacted without “consultations”.

But AIMTC is the lobby representing truck fleet owners (not truckers themselves) who are also equally concerned about the losses they face when their drivers strike. Madan, who owns 100 trucks, says he faced losses worth Rs 3000 per truck per day during the strike. But they are sympathetic to drivers because they see a looming shortage of drivers in the future.

“I think there will be a 25 per cent shortage in the future. And then you want to bring in such a law? Our drivers are not causing accidents on purpose." 

A ray of hope

Jehaan Kotwal of JFK Transporters Pvt Ltd is a fleet owner with a difference. As a son of truck driver, he knows first-hand what truckers face on the roads. He knows that the issues are systemic and deep-rooted. 

“If you do the math, if a truck driver has been driving for 30 years, statistically, he will have been in at least one accident that resulted in a death. That is a burden he has to live with even as he tries to make sure he keeps earning and driving to feed his family,” he says.

However, he believes that tech, in particular AI tech, could vastly improve matters. He is currently also the co-founder of a social enterprise revolving around helping heavy vehicle drivers stay safe on the road via an app called HumSafer - a play on the hindi word 'humsafar' or fellow passenger.

The app that can be downloaded on any smartphone monitors the driver's reflexes and faces - if he is blinking too much, indicating he is sleepy, the app will urge him to take a break and nap. It will play quizzes and other trivia games to keep him alert while driving. It will coach him on rules to follow or give necessary information the driver needs.

Kotwal has also identified 9 stakeholders — like the drivers, the police, fleet owners, insurance people, hospitals, among others.

Kotwal's aim is to have the driver having the ability to reach out for help depending on his situation — connecting him to the stakeholders who can help him. For instance, an alert that alerts the nearest doctor or hospital

The idea is to both prevent accidents by reducing human error but also giving the driver a support system he can rely on.

"It is in a very very naescent stage and we have to build a detailed tech stack for each stakeholder, but it is a solution that will work," says Kotwal. He has already seen some measure of success in his own company with his drivers using the app that is still being improved and built on.

His dream is that, in time, most of the 8 million truck drivers in India will have the app installed to ensure safer and accident-free travels. The road is long but tech might be the only way the truckers are finally heard despite the ad-hoc nature of the Indian logistics industry.