Blaming poor quality and faulty designing of roads to be the major cause of road accidents in India, the Supreme Court in a significant decision on Thursday directed the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) to take necessary steps to improve design of roads of all identified “black spots” and to conduct a mandatory
road safety audit before passing plan for any new road that is five kilometres or more.
The direction follows an earlier decision of the apex court by which a Committee of Road Safety was constituted headed by former Supreme Court judge KS Radhakrishnan. Based on the Committee’s recommendations and suggestions made by amicus curiae Gaurav Agarwal, a bench of Justices Madan B lokur and Deepak Gupta gave a slew of fresh directions focusing on road safety and engineering. The Court will monitor implementation of its directions on February 7.
Taking views of the Centre and all state Transport Secretaries, the bench said, “It appears that one of the main reasons for road accidents is the poor quality of roads, improper design, etc.” Although MoRTH has a protocol of identifying and rectifying black spots which comprise the major accident spots on a state-to-state basis, the bench pushed MoRTH to come out with a protocol on improving design of these roads.
The court directed the Centre to conduct road safety audit of every new road (5 kilometre or more) at the design stage and not an audit based on cost of the project. In this regard, the bench proposed States to set up a Road Safety Fund by March 31, 2018, the corpus of which will come from fines collected for traffic violations.
In addition to the Road Safety Council at state level as per Section 215 of Motor Vehicles Act, the Court proposed setting up of Road Safety Committee at district level headed by Collector and having representation of Superintendent of Police, Health Officers, PWD engineers, representatives of National Highway Authority, Road Transport office and civil society members. This Committee, to be set up by January 31, 2018, shall periodically review road safety measures and take corrective measures.