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| Piyush Tewari is trying to change the culture of India that discourages people from helping accident victims. |
In India, if you get in car wreck, you're really screwed. Because nobody will help you.
The system there turns people into indifferent jerks, says a recent article in the BBC.
Everything's stacked against you if you try to help an accident victim in India.
It arriving police see you rendering aid, they'll assume you're doing it out of guilt and charge you with causing the crash and you'll face criminal charges. Basically, you're a criminal for being a nice person.
It takes forever for ambulances to arrive at accident scenes in India, so it makes more sense to drive the victims to the hospital yourself. But if you do, the hospital will relentlessly hit you up for the victim's medical bills.
Even if you avoid criminal charges and hospital bills, you might be a witness in court proceedings involving the accident case.
Trials take forever to go forward, so you're stuck in limbo. You miss going to work, running your life.
BBC says there is a safety campaigner named Piyush Tewari whose cousin was once hit by a car and nobody helped.
He managed the Indian Supreme Court to issue guidelines that allow people to call emergency services and remain anonymous, provide them with immunity from criminal liability and forbidding hospitals from demanding payment from bystanders who take people to the hospitals.
Now he's working to get all jurisdictions in India to adopt these guidelines, and enshrine them in a Good Samaritan law. (Such laws are widespread in the United States.)
Let's hope Tewari's efforts work, because a lot of people are dying needlessly in India due to their system.
And thank goodness we in the U.S. live in a country in which, almost always, people run to help eery time they see a crash.
Everything's stacked against you if you try to help an accident victim in India.
It arriving police see you rendering aid, they'll assume you're doing it out of guilt and charge you with causing the crash and you'll face criminal charges. Basically, you're a criminal for being a nice person.
It takes forever for ambulances to arrive at accident scenes in India, so it makes more sense to drive the victims to the hospital yourself. But if you do, the hospital will relentlessly hit you up for the victim's medical bills.
Even if you avoid criminal charges and hospital bills, you might be a witness in court proceedings involving the accident case.
Trials take forever to go forward, so you're stuck in limbo. You miss going to work, running your life.
BBC says there is a safety campaigner named Piyush Tewari whose cousin was once hit by a car and nobody helped.
He managed the Indian Supreme Court to issue guidelines that allow people to call emergency services and remain anonymous, provide them with immunity from criminal liability and forbidding hospitals from demanding payment from bystanders who take people to the hospitals.
Now he's working to get all jurisdictions in India to adopt these guidelines, and enshrine them in a Good Samaritan law. (Such laws are widespread in the United States.)
Let's hope Tewari's efforts work, because a lot of people are dying needlessly in India due to their system.
And thank goodness we in the U.S. live in a country in which, almost always, people run to help eery time they see a crash.
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