Kerala Rising: From Exporting People to Exporting Ideas · Page 126 of 353

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS

KERALA RISING · FROM EXPORTING PEOPLE TO EXPORTING IDEAS
8. Safe Roads Kerala
Recognition where enforcement alone has
stalled. Human beings respond surprisingly well
to being seen doing the right thing. And Kerala
already runs AI cameras that only punish.
Saji has driven an autorickshaw in Kozhikode
for twenty-two years without a single accident.
He wears his helmet on the scooter home, he
slows at the school junction without being told,
he has taught three younger drivers to do the
same. In twenty-two years no one has ever
once acknowledged any of it. The only letters
he receives from the state are fines. The
cameras that watch him see only what he does
wrong, never the two decades he has done
right.
This chapter is about the half of road safety
Kerala has not yet built: the half that notices
Saji. Enforcement suppresses the worst
driving; it can never reward the best. And a
state that only ever punishes its careful drivers
should not be surprised that careful driving
never becomes a thing men compete over.
Kerala already operates one half of an AI road-safety
system, and at considerable cost. Under the Safe
Kerala project, 726 AI cameras went live on 20 April
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