A study on Commercial Truck Driver’s Vulnerability in India – Mitigations and Strategies for enrichment of Truck Drivers lifestyle By Dr. P. Senthilkumar* and N. Rajkumar Abstract

Root cause for the accidents on highway is presented in table 23 and major accidents happen due to opponent’s mistake and drowsiness which comprises of 27% and 28% respectively. When interviewed with the truck drivers it is understood from them that the accidents happen mostly during the early hours of morning between 3.00 AM and 6.00 AM where the truckers feel drowsy and a slip of the eye contact causes a major catastrophic accidents and this is in correlation to the safety on highways which is presented in table 24.

The relationship between the truckers and cops were studied and the harassment by cops to truckers were surveyed and the results are presented in table 25. The survey reveals that 73% of the truckers claim that the cops harass them demanding money even if all the regulated papers are in hand. This is one critical factor which needs to be addressed and escalated. One of the trucker while interview revealed that one of the cops collected 50000 INR in 45 minutes as bribe in on the dense populated traffic signal in Chennai located near the Port.

In this section the observations are statistically tested to find out the association and significance between one factor and the other. To analyse statistically Chi Square test and two way anova methods have been used to check the association and significance between each factor.

The Significance level considered in this analysis is α = 0.05. Chi-Square test was done for 10 associations to check the dependencies between categories as shown in Table 27. The “p” value is calculated based on the observed frequency and expected frequency. Later the “p” value is compared to the “α” value and the inferences are measured/noted. For every associations, a null hypothesis (H₀) and alternative hypothesis (H₁) is predetermined.

Now referring to table 27, it is observed that the associations which are dependent are between age of the truck drivers and the ownership levels where the p = 0.01 which is less than α = 0.05. Hence the H₀ is rejected and H₁ is accepted.

Some of the factors were tested using two way anova method and is presented in table 28. It is observed from the two way anova that certain factors have significant difference between the treatments like Age factor of the truck drivers, no. of accidents occurred. However, Vehicle loading condition, alcohol consumption, multiple sexual affairs, and awareness of AIDS are with no significance between the treatments for the given frequency of truck drivers.

The occurrence of accidents with respect to vehicle loading condition and alcohol consumption are not dependent. Irrespective of vehicle loading condition and alcohol consumption the accidents occur. Second, on the age factor when compared with co-relation with awareness of AIDS and multiple sexual affairs does not dependent with each other. Irrespective of age the truck drivers tend to sexual affairs.

The reason behind sexual affairs being interrelated with all ages of interval of truck drivers is that because of the high stress which are being undergone by these drivers. Moreover, these truck drivers spend hours in night traffic near highways and ports where there are possibilities for these truck drivers get mingled with sexual high risk behaviour. As these drivers are high in mobility they do not have sexual affair with single sex worker and indulge in multiple sexual relationships.