Drivers’ Welfare: The Missing Piece in India’s Mobility Vision

At the 65th SIAM Annual Convention, road transport minister Nitin Gadkari reiterated the themes he has been consistently championing: bringing down road accidents, reducing logistics costs, and transitioning towards clean mobility. These are all crucial objectives, and the automobile industry has been rightly asked to innovate on technology — safer vehicles, greener fuels, and more efficient systems.

But there is a missing piece. Road accidents, logistics efficiency, and even the pace of clean mobility adoption are not just about vehicles — they are about people. Specifically, the millions of men and women who drive buses, trucks, taxis, autos, and e-rickshaws every single day.

India already has the e-Shram portal for informal workers, with nearly 30 crore enrollments. It is a significant umbrella, linking unorganized workers to insurance and pension schemes. But it remains a general framework. Public vehicle drivers need something more specific — a dedicated national policy that recognizes driving as a profession and secures it across the lifecycle:-

-Training and Skilling for safe driving, EV handling, and digital platforms.

-Health and Safety measures, from fatigue regulation to mandatory health check-ups and accident insurance.

-Working Conditions with proper rest infrastructure and protections against overwork.

-Social Security and Retirement so that a driver’s decades on the road translate into dignity in old age.


It is worth remembering that much of Gadkari’s emphasis — whether on road safety or on lowering logistics costs — depends directly on the welfare and stability of drivers. Fatigued, uninsured, or financially insecure drivers are more accident-prone, less productive, and less able to adapt to new technologies.

In recent years, states have started to design policies for “gig workers” — a welcome recognition of new-economy vulnerabilities. But public vehicle drivers are the core-economy workforce in mobility. Their welfare deserves the same urgency.

A lot of emphasis has rightly been placed on vehicle innovation. But vehicles are driven by humans. For millions, driving is not just a function — it is a profession, and a lifelong livelihood. How about innovation in their safety, welfare, and security?

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

"Bored" or Rewriting the Playbook? A Rebuttal to the West’s Sneering Gaze at India’s Legacy Billionaire Gen Z

Bloomberg's Andy Mukherjee’s latest opinion piece — sniggering at India’s legacy billionaire Gen Z for supposedly being “bored” of their family businesses — is hardly an outlier. It’s part of a long tradition in Western financial journalism that looks at Indian wealth with a potent mix of discomfort, disapproval, and condescension. This time, though, the criticism is not just ill-founded — it’s tone-deaf to the massive opportunity this generation represents. Let’s take this piece apart. One Family ≠ All of India’s Business Dynasties Mukherjee builds his entire thesis on the Piramals winding down their legacy luggage business. But the Piramals are not a one-business family — and that luggage brand was far from the family’s economic center of gravity. In fact, they've pivoted toward high-value sectors like pharmaceuticals and financial services. To generalise this as a “pattern” of disinterest across India’s business scions is absurd. Most Legacy Next-Gen Heirs Aren’t Losing Inte...
Read more

Wipro’s Great Squander — From India’s First Computer-Maker to a Service-Provider at Risk of Irrelevance

The recent Infosys share buyback has reignited debates around Indian IT’s long-term strategy. While buybacks boost valuations temporarily, critics have rightly contrasted Indian IT majors with their Western counterparts. Companies like Oracle, Microsoft, or Salesforce use financial engineering alongside innovation, whereas Indian IT often leans on financial maneuvers in place of sustained innovation. BusinessLine, among others, has highlighted this growing gap — and the criticism was overdue. But to understand what’s at stake, we need to go back to the history of one of India’s IT bellwethers — Wipro. Unlike Infosys, Wipro was not always a services-only company. It has a product-building DNA that it has all but abandoned. Wipro’s Legacy of Product-Building Wipro was an Indian pioneer in personal computing. In the 1980s, it made one of India’s earliest PCs, well before mass-market computing became common. In the 2000s and 2010s, Wipro used to make desktop and laptop PCs. Beyond IT serv...
Read more

AI Context-Adding: The Next Leap in Social Media Credibility

Social media has given us unprecedented access to news and ideas — but also unprecedented exposure to mis- and disinformation. While platforms have tried various solutions, few have achieved the right balance between speed, credibility, inclusivity, and neutrality. One of the more promising ideas in recent years is X’s Community Notes — a crowdsourced way to add user-generated context to posts. But as it stands, the system is still largely unmoderated, inconsistent, and prone to both bias and misuse. I believe the idea can be greatly enhanced by blending democratic user participation with the speed and scale of AI. Not to fact-check in an aggressive, “true/false” sense, but to add benign, nuanced context that enriches understanding and reduces online polarization. The Model I Propose  1. Open Participation – The system should be open to all users, or at least low-barrier paying users. 2. Evidence-Based Flagging – Users can flag a post they believe lacks context or misrepresents eve...
Read more