Vinayaram’s device holds potential to save motorists’ lives

The patent holder of a ‘flexible road barrier with indicator’, which holds immense potential to save the lives of motorists, has sought the help of experts and the government to popularise it.

C.A. Vinayaram, who hails from Mattancherry near here, won the patent for the device in 2016. He was allegedly given the cold shoulder by road safety experts in Kerala for the device that he painstakingly developed a decade ago.

It was an accident that led Mr. Vinayaram to work on such a device. In 2003, a car in which he was travelling rammed an unlit median while it was overtaking a tanker lorry in Kannur. It was a narrow escape, he said.

Mr. Vinayaram expressed shock at the plight of unscientifically-built medians — most of them not having even a reflector to warn motorists, claiming the lives of hundreds of people each year in India.

A tourist guide by profession, he knocked at the doors of agencies such as Thiruvananthapuram-based National Transportation Planning and Research Centre (NATPAC) and the Indian Roads Congress (IRC) for support.

A senior official of NATPAC said the innovation was good and had the potential to prevent accidents, since each unit of the flexible median has electricity or solar-powered LED on top to warn motorists.

Lack of funds

“It can even lessen the impact of an accident, since it mainly comprises a spring and is hence flexible. Sadly, the agency does not have the funds for conducting a field study. Hence, we referred it to Kerala State Council for Science, Technology and Environment, following which it was referred to a reputed government engineering college,” said the official.

The innovator is dejected that he is not in a position to manufacture the device in bulk, even when he is getting orders from many parts of India and abroad. “One of the agencies that I approached sought ₹10 lakh to do the field study, while another sought ₹2 lakh. I do not have that kind of money to spare. There are limits to what an individual can do. The government and road safety stakeholders must take steps to test and popularise such devices and also improvise on them if need be.”

Mr. Vinayaram said the idea was still in cold storage, though it was taken up with two Chief Ministers. In 2012, the late V.R. Krishna Iyer, who retired as judge of the Supreme Court, had written to the then Chief Justice of the Kerala High Court in this regard, urging that his letter be treated as a Public Interest Litigation since the device had the potential to save hundreds of lives each year.

Medians as deathtraps

Twenty persons died after an LPG tanker rammed an unscientific and ill-lit road median at Chala in Kannur in 2012.

The same year, a car in which actor Jagathy Sreekumar was travelling, hit a road median near Calicut University, in which he suffered serious injuries. Five powerlifters were killed and another critically injured after their car rammed a median on the Delhi-Haryana border in 2018.

source: http://www.thehindu.com / The Hindu / Home> News> Cities> Kochi / by John L. Paul / Kochi – March 22nd, 2019