The Indian government has made it compulsory to use the Antilock Braking System (ABS) for all the commercial vehicles from the April 2015. The manufacturers have been allotted with the extra time of 6 months to fulfill this requirement before launching their vehicles in the market. This step will definitely improve the road safety, which is currently below par in India.
According to the Economic Time, India is the global leader in restringing the road accident deaths as around 1.40 Lac people lost their precious life in over 5 Lac reported road accidents and it means that one person is dying every 4 minutes on Indian roads. Now, you can imagine the need of this law and grim situation of fear from which the people are passing by every single second. Reports also suggest that the around 28-30% of these accidents involved commercial vehicles like trucks, buses and the tractors with 75% of them losing the control or lane before meeting an accident.
This ABS mandate will surely help improving the safety as it will help to achieve better traction control and necessary brake pressure to each wheel in the conditions of heavy braking. However, the vehicles will get a price hike of around INR 50,000 to 1 Lac, but I guess the life is far more important than the price. Still, the passenger vehicles are out of the mandate and the government need to think about it, if they want India to stand in the list of road safe countries.
