Kerala - Kochi   

Road accident a sin, says Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil

Special Correspondent

KOCHI: The number of deaths on roads in Kerala has been so alarmingly high that Cardinal Varkey Vithayathil was recently forced to ask the Catholic faithful in his Ernakulam-Angamaly archdiocese to mention careless driving at the time of confession.

"It is a sin that needs to be confessed," the Cardinal said in a pastoral letter, which was read out to the congregation at all churches in the archdiocese on Sunday. He also said that it was a sin to drive a vehicle without attending to its repairs. He reminded drivers that they had the heavy moral obligation of saving their own as well as others' lives.

By taking a clear religious stand — that careless driving is a sin — on this temporal issue, the Cardinal was voicing the Church's anguish at the number of lives being snuffed out on the roads. He pointed out that drunken driving was a major cause for road accidents and urged the people to cooperate with the authorities in their efforts to make roads safe.

Kerala is competing with Maharashtra to become the number one State in terms of traffic accidents. The State lost 28,000 lives in road accidents in the past decade. A half-a-million others were wounded, in many cases maimed or disabled for life.

Let statistics speak: 3,055 people died and more than 50,000 were injured in 2004 in 41,000 accidents. The economic cost of these was Rs.453 crores, which was roughly 1.5 per cent of the Gross Domestic Product of the State.

The tiny State's density of vehicle population is 65 per sq km, which is four times the national average. Kerala has an estimated three million vehicles, and the vehicle population grows by two lakhs every year.

Human error is behind most of the road accidents. And, drunken driving causes a half of all the accidents. Drunken driving is commonplace in Kerala and rarely do drivers get hauled up for driving after drinking.

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