Himachal Chief Minister Virbhadra Singh on Sunday underlined the need to strengthen emergency services and trauma care to save precious human lives which are lost in road accidents in the State.
The intelligent transport system is the need of hour and infrastructure investments should take it into account, said the Chief Minister while speaking at the third meeting of the group of Ministers on Road Safety and Ease of Transport organised in Kangra.
As many as 1099 persons lost their lives in road accidents during 2014 and 1096 in 2015 whereas 5576 and 5108 people were injured during this period respectively in Himachal.
The injuries in the hill States were life long, said the Chief Minister adding that several people expire on account of such injuries which were later classified as accidental deaths.
He said that though Himachal Pradesh accounts for only 0.54 per cent of the total population of the country but it was one of the states which constitutes high risk areas reporting higher rates of accidental deaths.
Virbhadra Singh said that State Government had given top priority to the road sector, however, this sector in hilly States involved several issues like high cost of construction and maintenance. In the light of available infrastructure, the state had been continuously facing the issue of road safety and evolving a mechanism of reducing accidents, he said.
The Chief Minister said that there were just 288 kms of length of motorable roads in the State at the time of Independence and as on date, Himachal has a strong network of 34,359 kms roads and 1913 bridges.
He said that out of 17,000 census villages, over 10,000 villages had been connected with roads in the State.
The road safety affects all and more particularly the poor and the injuries place a heavy burden on the household finances of the victims and their families. To address the problems, effective steps including road design, engineering, driver behavior, training, skills, traffic management, emergency medical care, evacuation of victims, dedicated services like 108 needed to be taken care, said Virbhadra Singh.
He said that there is also a need to highlight National Accident Relief Policy and a fund should be created for road safety. A roadmap should be formulated for the next decade with a view to reduce accidents by half by the year 2025, said he.
The Chief Minister also stressed upon use of more IT tools in traffic and road management along-with road safety audit.
He said that Himachal Government has allocated Rs 50 crore each for the financial years 2016-17 for engineering measures to rectify identified black spots. The state had embarked upon a project with the support from World Bank, under the State Roads Project to implement the Road Accident Data Management System (RADMS) which would help in collecting the road accident data and then analysing it, he added.
The Chief Minister also underlined the need to invest more on road engineering.
He urged the Government of India to provide sufficient funds for hill states like Himachal Pradesh which have limited resources, in order to speed up the pace of road works and to ensure road safety to a great extent.
He welcomed the step of the Government of India to have four lanes for traffic where traffic count was more than 10000 passenger car unit (PCU) and Bharat Parimala Yojana which aimed at developing 7000 kilometers, the Bharat Setu Project and the Rail Over Bridge (ROB) Policy.
Virbhadra also Singh urged the Union Government not to restrict ROB approval only for national highways, but also to allow the State to undertake ROB and rural and other category roads as money deposited with the Railways takes years to even start the work.