OUR UNCARING SOCIETY
How can we walk on as a person lies dying on the road? What stops us from extending a helping hand to a person in distress? ……..Meenakshi Kumar | TNN
On August 21, just a few hours before the eagerly awaited iPhone was launched in the country, a young man was walking the streets of central Delhi, pleading for help. He had been stabbed seven times. Bleeding profusely, his assailants still right behind him, Manmohan Singh desperately tried to flag down cars, buses, anyone who’d help. No one stopped. Finally, a passing autorickshaw driver took pity on Singh, taking him off the streets and straight to hospital.
Just three days before Singh’s ordeal on Delhi’s unquiet streets, Nirmala Kadam died on a busy road in Mumbai. Hit by a taxi while crossing the road, Kadam was then run over by a bus. As she lay in a pool of blood, begging for water, the world turned a blind eye to Kadam’s distress. Even the constables who came ostensibly to help, treated her with callous neglect. She died on the way to hospital.
Singh and Kadam are not the only victims of our uncaring society. Almost every other day, on some mean street, in some madding city crowd, someone falls victim to the apathy of his fellow citizens. People refuse to help in the hour of crisis. They turn their backs or remain mute bystanders. What has happened to our sense of compassion? Did we ever have it at all?
“It’s not that people are lacking in compassion,” says sociologist Patricia Uberoi. “It’s just that they don’t want to get involved.” That’s because citizens generally fear the cops and don’t want to get embroiled in legal issues. On the streets, it’s hard to enforce the Supreme Court’s guidelines directing lay Indians never to ignore the injured and medical practitioners never to turn away victims of road accidents. Often, bureaucratic formalities engulf the Good Samaritan. Last month, Mumbai businessman Kirit Gada took the victim of a train accident to hospital. Much to his shock, he was fined Rs 1,200 by the police and labelled ‘drunk’ by the hospital authorities after he had an argument with a doctor over delayed assistance to the victim. Gada would now think twice before reaching out to another casualty.
TOO MUCH TROUBLE
“It’s not that people are lacking in compassion,” says sociologist Patricia Uberoi. “It’s just that they don’t want to get involved.” That’s because citizens generally fear the cops and don’t want to get embroiled in legal issues. On the streets, it’s hard to enforce the Supreme Court’s guidelines directing lay Indians never to ignore the injured and medical practitioners never to turn away victims of road accidents. Often, bureaucratic formalities engulf the Good Samaritan. Last month, Mumbai businessman Kirit Gada took the victim of a train accident to hospital. Much to his shock, he was fined Rs 1,200 by the police and labelled ‘drunk’ by the hospital authorities after he had an argument with a doctor over delayed assistance to the victim. Gada would now think twice before reaching out to another casualty.
“As long as accident cases involve bureaucratic hassles, nobody would like to help,” says social scientist Shiv Vishwanathan. “A lot of them may be keen, but shy away from coming forward.” If it’s a criminal incident, the legal system may deter people from offering a helping hand. “People in India are the same as anywhere else in the world. But it’s our system that makes them so callous. Our judicial system treats even a witness as a criminal. So why would a common man come forward to help?” asks Ved Marwah, former Delhi police commissioner. The infamous BMW incident (in which an industrialist’s grandson Sanjeev Nanda ran over six people in Delhi in January 1999) is a striking example — many of the witnesses in the case turned hostile in court.
Many believe that Indians lack a strong sense of civic duty. “We have become comfortable in ignoring our basic duty,” says Maxwell Pereira, retired senior police officer. He argues that fear of the cops and the legal system is misplaced. The police just do their duty, he says, but it’s our sheer cussedness and attitude that prevents us from helping out. “It’s sad that when a person is lying on the road, we prefer to look the other way. It speaks volumes about our sense of duty towards our fellow citizens.”
WE JUST DON’T CARE
At times, it’s about passing the buck — “let somebody else help, I’m in a rush.” Says Harman Singh Sidhu, who was once a victim of an accident and now heads Chandigarh-based NGO ArriveSAFE, which helps people like Delhi’s unfortunate Manmohan Singh. “At least 90% cases (the NGO has helped) are those where people have refused to help the victim,” he says. It’s an alarming statistic. But more shocking by far is the callousness of those the state pays to be Good Samaritans — ambulances, police and hospitals. Sidhu recalls seeing ambulances heedlessly whiz past accident victims. It is common enough to hear of hospitals turning casualties away.
In Delhi recently, one hospital demanded a Rs 40,000 deposit from the person who brought in an accident victim. When the Good Samaritan refused, he was asked to take the casualty elsewhere. A scuffle ensued and the police were called in. It was revealed that the hospital had a history of denying admission to accident victims.
But it’s an incident in Kolkata which takes the cake and shows how far we can fall. When security guard Kadam Prasad Panth was taken ill on a bus, the driver stopped. Panth was brought out of the bus and made to lie on the pavement. People crowded around; no one did anything to help or offer water. Meanwhile, police from two different areas squabbled over which jurisdiction applied to Panth. By the time they sorted out their differences, the old man was dead.
What explains such callousness? “The visuality of the situation forces us into becoming spectators. A complete sense of non-involvement takes over,” reasons Vishwanathan. We switch off and rush away to resume our busy lives.
But some believe it may also have something to do with our sense of social status. “The higher we are in the social pecking order, the lower we are in our compassion quotient,” says Subroto Das, founder, Lifeline Foundation. “In most cases, it’s usually the villager or the poor man on the cycle who will help. The excuse given by big car owners is that the upholstery of the car will get spoilt or that they don’t have time to waste,” he adds.
Das should know. Ten years ago, his car rammed into a tree on a highway in Gujarat. His wife and a friend in the back seat were badly injured. Though he was badly hurt too, Das managed to work his way out of the car. He spent four hours trying to flag down vehicles on the highway. It was much later that a milkman stopped and helped Das get on a bus. Today, Das’ NGO provides an ambulance service and basic medical aid within the ‘golden hour’ (the hour immediately after an accident). The service covers 1,476 km of highways across Gujarat, Maharashtra, and West Bengal.
LIMITED COMPASSION
LIMITED COMPASSION
Natural calamities and riots often produce a crop of touching stories. During the Mumbai floods of 2005, the worst in living memory, residents famously handed out bread and water to the weary and threw open their homes to complete strangers. And yet Mumbai ignored Nirmala Kadam as she lay dying on the street.
Vishwanathan believes Indians are generous when all that’s needed is food and shelter, but mean-spirited if an incident could end in a police station or court of law. Our Gandhigiri appears to stop at donating money to victims of natural disasters. But we would rather not take a casualty off the roads and to hospital. At least part of the callousness may be a habit ingrained by years of clandestine help during communal riots. As Pereira says, those who help, do it because they don’t want more riots. “But in accident cases, people just don’t want to help.”
The fact that people can be caring sometimes and callous at others puzzles Uberoi. “It’s a question that needs to be asked. How can people be so caring with family and friends, but not towards his fellow man, even if a stranger? It’s almost like the need to keep oneself and one’s homes clean but not your surroundings. It’s a strange contradiction,” she wonders.
Everyone agrees it is time the state created institutional mechanisms to ensure the good Samaritan is hailed, not harassed. Till then, we may carry on, turning our backs on civic duty.
WHY WE DON’T HELP
WHY WE DON’T HELP
People don’t want to get involved with the police
Those driving cars and taxis worry about the seat covers getting stained
Few want to ‘waste’ time by stopping to help an accident victim
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Many feel someone else might help, so why bother at all
(WITH INPUTS FROM KUMAR SAMBHAV, MUMBAI AND KRISHNENDU BANDYOPADHYAY, KOLKATA)
DEATH IN A METRO: Nirmala Kadam was crossing the road when she was first hit by a taxi and then by a bus in Mumbai. As she lay there, bleeding and begging for water, cars drove by and people looked on. She died on the way to hospital