The New Year being ushered in, two principal challenges are staring at State police-one is the spiraling number of accidents taking toll of lives nearly daily and the other is the conduct of the upcoming Assembly election due early next year in a peaceful manner. However, to the credit of the police, crime rate has drastically come down in the last leg of the passing year with police having cracked most of the major crime cases.
Additional DGP (law and order) Ram Singh Meena said that crimes under control, their focus would be trained to ensure peaceful conduct of the upcoming Assembly election scheduled in 2017.
He said, “The district police officers have been directed to identity the sensitive and ultra- sensitive places from the standpoint of the election and to act accordingly.”
Meena said that sensitivity of polling booths during election depends on various factors like crime graph, communal tensions, political turmoil and character of the candidates. The district police heads have been directed to try all means to keep things under control as far as the sensitive and ultra- sensitive polling booths are concerned, he said, adding that police must act in accordance with the records of the past elections.
Moreover, despite the state government officials claiming to have taken measures to check road accidents, the statistics are telling a different story.
It is clear from the figures that the numbers of accidents have further risen this year as compared to the figures of the previous two years, especially in some of the plain districts like Udham Singh Nagar, Dehradun, Haridwar and Nainital.
Statistics revealed that a total of 1450 road accidents were reported from January 1 to November 30, 2016 in the state while 888 persons died and 1220 were injured. The maximum accidents occurred in the plain districts which include 351 accidents in Udham Singh Nagar, 320 in Haridwar, 262 in Dehradun and 187 in Nainital district. Report, however, revealed that the numbers of accidents and casualties had fallen slightly in the mountainous parts of the State.
Worried over spiralling accidents happening across the state, State DGP MA Ganapathy recently directed district police heads to control things. In view of dumpers/trucks causing increasing number of accidents, he asked police to stop the menace of over-speeding aside from launching awareness campaign among the people over the danger lurking in drunk and rash driving.
However, with the accident spree continuing to kill people, the observers say that the police should clamp down on the practice of untrained drivers driving in the treacherous hills. Besides, they attribute the rising number of accidents to poor maintenance of the roads.