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Windscreen Savers

Windshield Experts is trying to heighten awareness of a danger few think about.

Smashed out: Smart choice

While the world is allegedly a rational place, people almost never know the risks they face.

Ask Gopal S. Krishnan, an adman, who now says, "I wish I was a little more informed." It happened six years ago. On his way back from work, he was waiting to take a right turn when a van from the opposite side lost control and hit his car--smashing his windscreen and micro-blitzing his face with shrapnel and tiny glass particles. Six months later, he was still on bed with a bandaged face, 350-odd stitches down, and with only his left eye's vision left. He still can't believe how ignorant he'd been, being an adman and all that.

Ignorant, that is, about tempered windshields. According to Windshield Experts, a Delhi-based windshield service firm, half the cars that get a windshield replaced in Delhi get themselves a tempered windshield. It's much cheaper, you see--and it's a rare garage that bothers explaining the difference.

The difference is lamination. A laminated windshield, which costs more, holds the glass fragments in place--between the two PVB lamination films--when it shatters. Such a windscreen is also safer when a head smashes against it, given its relative flexibility--and is also a whole lot more protective if a hard object is thrown at it.

Now, all new cars come fitted with such windscreens off the assembly line, as required by law (this was enacted in 1996), but there's little that can be done in the voluntary replacement market--where buck-saving typically wins the day. Of the average 300 cars suffering a smash every day in Delhi, half will not bother to guard themselves from Krishnan's fate.

They don't have access to advice. The big problem, according to Ratish Ramanujam, COO, Windshield Experts, is that windshield services in India are highly disorganised, and that's what he is trying to change.

As a comprehensive service provider, the firm runs a network of retail outlets (with seven shops in Delhi and its suburbs, so far) that also offer to fix little chips and cracks in laminated glass. A crack of up to 40 mm, it claims, can be fixed to make it virtually unnoticeable.

The real challenge, however, is to conduct its safety campaign within the meagre resources it has at its disposal. Thankfully, the sheer gravity of the issue makes the job easier. Even the most apathetic of people pay attention when they discover it's an issue of life and death--and not somebody else's.

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