With Odisha observing the Road Safety Week from January 7, the biggest revelation on road accidents in the State is when four in every ten accidents are due to overloading or overcrowding or load protruding and another around three per ten accidents are due to vehicular defects, it appears in such a ‘road safety’ ambience only a cat with nine lives could survive on the State roads.
The result: In every 100 accidents, around 41 lives are cut short in the State against the national average of mere 29. And the deaths due to road accidents account for a high of over 17 persons per lakh population against mere nine in neighbouring Andhra Pradesh and Jharkhand.
According to the 2015-16 road accident statistics with the State Transport Department, a whopping around 3,239 of a total of over 10, 540 road accidents are to due to defects in vehicles like defective brakes or steering, punctured/burst/bald tyres, etc. And another whopping over 4,100 accidents are due to overloading/overcrowding/load protruding. Moreover, nearly 970 accidents last year on State roads were due to drunk driving which account for nearly 1 per cent of the total accidents; and the Supreme Court order on shifting liquor outlets 500 metre away from highways assumes significance here.
Data also reveal that another over 2,650 accidents on State roads are due to drivers giving two hoots to traffic norms. A whopping 41 per cent of road accidents in Odisha are due to not adhering to the prescribed speed limits by vehicles of all sorts. Moreover, most of the accidents in the State happen in Y-and T-junctions. The result: A high of over 3,030 road accidents are due to overturning or head-on collision.
These statistics very clearly bring to the fore how lack of vigilance on the part of the Road Transport Offices (RTOs) and traffic police who are entrusted with the task of making random periodic checks of vehicles to detect plying of defective vehicles, overloaded or over sped vehicles on roads because a dutiful RTO/Traffic Police could have prevented at least 80 per cent of road accidents.
Strict surveillance is the need of the hour in the State to curb the rising road accidents because with the vehicle density on the rise, the grim fact is around 25 road accidents are recorded per 10,000 vehicles on roads. And this is bound to increase with the rise in vehicle density because data show such evident rise in high vehicular density States like Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu, except Gujarat.
Another interesting fact is road accidents hit Odisha hard across the rural-urban divide as rural areas account for nearly 55 per cent of the total such accidents, but in terms of lives lost rural areas account for nearly 60 per cent of the fatality load.