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Dinesh Mohan Championed Public Transport, Public Protests

Vidyadhar Date

21/05/2021: I was very sad to hear of the death this morning of Dinesh Mohan, noted expert on road safety, in St Stephen’s hospital in Delhi. It is a big loss to the international campaign for road safety, he was a consultant to many countries and currently the U.N. is observing a road safety week.

He did pioneering research on road crashes with Prof Geetam Tiwari in Delhi IIT for many years.

His partner is Peggy Mohan, the noted linguist and her book on Indian languages was scheduled to be released this evening.

Dinesh Mohan was also politically very progressive and wrote an article for Wire earlier this year making a strong plea for the right to protest in public spaces in the context of the Shaheen Baug and farmer agitations.

A real loss. I met him at several conferences, the last was in in Pune on road safety organized two years ago by Sujit Patwardhan and his team.

He was a great champion of public transport , a rare voice in a snobbish society flaunting its love for the motor car at the expense of common people.

Dinesh Mohan wrote extensively on road safety and crashes, he wrote books, research papers, articles, participated in numerous international conferences.. He was one of the few people I looked forward to hearing, there was something always new, refreshing, such a change from most boring, lifeless presentations one comes across often at conferences.

In an article he wrote some time ago, he was also critical of the automobile and media industry. An analysis, based on a survey of the print advertisements and TV commercials for safety content, and the pricing policy for offering safety technology of six major automobile manufacturers, shows that manufacturers are not promoting safety issues or their safety technology in any significant manner. They are not offering airbags or anti-lock braking systems in most of the base models costing less than $12,000. It is the responsibility of the Government of India to announce strict crashworthiness standards for cars sold in India, since vehicle manufacturers generally do not provide safety features unless forced to do so.

Reacting to Tata’s Nano, he had said that it would have been better if Tatas had gone in for a cheap bus.

A proper tribute to Dinesh Mohan would be for India to reduce road crash injuries and deaths. It now has the shameful record of accounting for the highest number of deaths in the world, surpassing China. Also, it is desperately necessary to reduce speeds, a suggestion made repeatedly in many countries during the current global safety week. For this we must educate our speed-crazy politicians, bureaucrats and engineers who are virtually acting at the best of the motor car lobby and glorifying the speed machine at the cost of human life.

Road accident scenario in India is more threatening than Corona virus, declared Nitin Gadkari, transport minister, recently while releasing a World Bank report on road safety. The report titled “Traffic Crash Injuries and Disabilities: The Burden on Indian Society”, highlights the disproportionate impact of a road crash on poor households that pushes them into a vicious cycle of poverty and debt. It sheds light on the links between road crashes, poverty, inequality, and vulnerable road users in India.

The 6th UN Global Road Safety Week, held 17-23 May 2021, highlights the benefits of low-speed urban streets as the heart of any community. The Week calls on policy-makers to act for low-speed streets in cities worldwide, limiting speeds to 30 km/h (20 mph) where people live, work and play. Low-speed streets make for cities that are not only safe, but also healthy, green and liveable. The objectives of the Week are to garner policy commitments at national and local levels to deliver 30 km/h speed limits and zones in urban areas; generate local support for such low-speed measures; and build momentum towards the launch of the Global Plan for the Decade of Action for Road Safety 2021-2030 in late 2021 and the High-Level Meeting of the UN General Assembly in 2022.

Though Dinesh Mohan was based in Delhi many decision makers and even the media have not shown enough awareness to the issue of road safety. This is clear from the way much of the media has suppressed the news of the death of a prominent member of its own fraternity, Renu Agal, editor of Hindi Print and former BBC professional. She was hit by a car allegedly driven by a drunken official of the defence organization DRDO in March and she succumbed to her injuries last month. I think one reason her death received less attention is that she was travelling in a cycle rickshaw, a very downmarket way of travelling in a status conscious capital city. She did not own a car. This must be so odd for the snobbish upper class. This class thinks that every road user other than a motorist is a nuisance and should be marginalized.

Dinesh Mohan was so unlike this class. He had a heart and was a great supporter of public transport auto rickshaw, cycle rickshaw, pedestrians. He was not opposed to cars but he was certainly against monopolization of street space by cars.

(Vidyadhar Date is a senior journalist and author of a book concerned with road safety and the cause of public transport, cyclists and pedestrians. Courtesy: Countercurrents.org.)

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Dinesh Mohan, Contrarian Scholar Who Devoted a Lifetime to Affordable, Safe Urban Transport

Subhashis Banerjee

‘Contrarian’ is the word that came to my mind when I first met Dinesh Mohan more than three decades back. We were introduced in the faculty lunch club soon after I joined IIT Delhi. After a hearty welcome, he unleashed a barrage of questions, with genuine curiosity, about research on computer vision which was my subject. Later would come the provocative comments – on the social relevance of such research, on the potential evil of such technology (e.g. as used in missiles during the Gulf War), and on how, beyond the elegant geometry and estimation theory of my discipline, lay deeper ethical concerns. His gruff tone did make me defensive and even irritated, yet the friendliness and lack of aggression made me engage with it all.

He was a very well read man, and our discussions were highly enriching. For the next 30 years of our association , our discussions – and arguments – continued over coffee and weekend drinks in the pubs around IIT Delhi on all sorts of matters related to technology, science, education, policy, governments, politics and society. And, of late, COVID-19. They continued till just about a month back, when Dinesh Mohan fell prey to the wretched disease.

As may be expected, his flamboyance and outspokenness raised hackles in the staid environment of IIT Delhi, and universal popularity was something he neither sought nor got.

Dinesh was not shy of his politics. His contrarian views and advocacy stemmed from his imagination of an egalitarian society. His research on transportation and injury prevention were original and of far reaching impact. If ever our cities manage to have open spaces, decongested footpaths with space for hawkers, street-vendors and pedestrians, if ever we have dedicated lanes for cyclists, safe traffic, affordable public transport, then due credit must go to the early conceptions by Dinesh. For it was he who articulated a pedestrian- and cyclist-first approach. Not that he was a Luddite opposing cars, but his was a rational and principled reservation on elevated highways passing through cities at the cost of the city’s pedestrians, cyclists, and on private cars hogging public space.

Many of his simpler yet intriguing research questions were supported by orthodox engineering methodology. For example, when he along with his team members conclusively established that the vulnerable looking three-wheeler autorickshaws were actually amazingly stable contraptions, or that their presence on city roads slowed down traffic and thereby prevented accidents, or that helmets and seat-belts provided a huge level of protection against injury, he used rigorous engineering analysis.

On the other, hand some of his other, more extraordinary claims on complex policy questions – for example, the utility of metro rail systems in Indian cities, or on the use of compressed natural gas (CNG) in public transport, or on the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) system – certainly left room for doubt. On all these issues, he was fiercely argumentative and provocative.

Dinesh clearly preferred ‘low cost’ solutions, and this made him vehemently oppose the metro rail system in Delhi. He argued that the system will be prohibitively expensive and will have to be forever subsidised; that the construction process will be extraordinarily polluting which will offset possible post-construction lessening of pollution; that the reduction in congestion was likely to be short-lived because the requirement of a strong feeder system will not permit reduction of the number of buses, and any freed up space will only be occupied by more cars in an aspirational society. He also alluded to undesirable side-effects, like unrealistically elevated property prices along metro routes.

Dinesh believed that the high cost of engine conversions and the requirements of specially designed closed-loop catalytic converters will make CNG in public transport unviable in the long run, and pollution benefits, if any, will only be marginal. He argued that diesel engines are more mainstream and are likely to see more significant improvements in pollution reduction through research, and the real benefits in pollution control should come from quickly making public transport more convenient and popular, thereby reducing the number of private cars and congestion on the roads. He rooted for low-floor air-conditioned diesel buses and argued that additional pollution, if any, can be offset by the larger number of people they may carry.

Dinesh fiercely opposed the lockdown of March 2020 and was absolutely dismayed by the humanitarian crisis it caused. But this made him underestimate COVID-19 and he would sometimes say that the COVID-19 problem was more imagined than real, and that there was no evidence of any large scale distress due to the disease, at least in India. He appeared to be in favour of a let-the-disease-play-out model like in Sweden.

Of course, many of these contrarian arguments had tremendous merit, but as a conservative computer scientist I was trained to be sceptical of any claim not supported by a theorem, and of arguments that claimed legitimacy by plotting graphs based on data, which was not easy to verify. So I and several others contested his views. The number of cups of coffee that must have been downed by people in the IIT Delhi coffee shops listening to Dinesh passionately argue against the metro and CNG is mind boggling. And I never managed to convince him that randomised controlled trials were more often than not conceptually unsound for making causal attributions and he should use more convincing methods in support of his arguments.

Dinesh got into trouble with the BRT. He and Geetam Tiwari – a common friend and colleague of many years, and a superbly trained architect and town planner – designed the bus corridor at the centre of the road, drawing inspiration from a very successful similar design in Bogota, Colombia. The design provided for pedestrian footpaths and dedicated cycle paths on the sides, and placing the bus corridor at the centre was meant to keep pedestrians and cyclists safe from the buses. Their penchant for ‘low cost’ avoided provision for escalators or subways between the road-sides to the bus stations at the centre.

As a result, though the design achieved its original aim of significantly increasing the overall flow of person-kilometres per unit time by increasing the flow of buses, it created incredible congestion for cars when people crossed the roads to reach the buses. Poor implementation with unsynchronised traffic lights and poor enforcement of traffic discipline by the police compounded the problem. Though slowing down the cars did not adversely affect the person-kilometres per unit time objective, they failed to correctly assess the combined protesting power of aspirational ‘middle class’ car owners. The project ran into trouble and was ultimately abandoned when the AAP government came to power. Dinesh was extremely disappointed but he did privately admit – perhaps in a rare moment of weakness – that he went a little overboard with his egalitarian objectives.

What impressed many of us most about Dinesh was the way he ran the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) in IIT Delhi. It was run almost entirely using grant money from sponsored research projects funded by private entities, and he managed to co-opt people of all kinds – including civil, mechanical and bio-medical engineers, architects and town planners, statisticians and economists, applied mechanics folks and computer scientists – to work on transportation related problems in a multi-disciplinary approach. TRIPP is a one-of its-kind in the country and its unique success is rightly attributed to Dinesh’s rare ability to attract people and his open mindedness in sharing a project and its idea. Just a few days back, TRIPP was made a full-fledged research centre in IIT Delhi.

While writing this remembrance I contacted a common friend of ours, Sachin Maheshwari, who first introduced me to Dinesh. This is what I got back:

“Yes he was crazy.

“He was crazy to attempt and pull off creation and successful running of an interdisciplinary research programme funded entirely, year after year, by grant money; where people from disparate areas came together to do work to a common objective. He was crazy enough to spend forty five years of his life among people who actually thought he was crazy.”

That pretty much sums it up. Dinesh was an extraordinary faculty member and a public intellectual in the Indian academic setting. He will be missed.

(Subhashis Banerjee is a professor of computer science and engineering, IIT Delhi. Courtesy: The Wire.)