Indian roads are continuing to record at least one accident every minute, and one on-road death every four minutes. The telling numbers as per the latest data for 2013 with the Centre suggests the alarming trend hasn’t been bucked despite the Centre’s efforts.
Statistics show that there was marginally less number of accidents in 2013 (compared to 2012) but more people died — the severity rate of accidents, which is number of people killed per 100 accidents, has increased.
The latest report from the Transport Research Wing (TRW) of the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways shows 4,86,476 road crashes occurred in 2013, when compared to 4,90,383 in 2012, which is slight dip of 0.8 per cent.
The statistics show that at least 1,37,572 lost their lives in the accidents in 2013, when compared to 2012, when 1,38,258 died. This is decline of 0.5 per cent. Accident severity saw an increase of 0.3 per cent. The Government had recorded 28.2 deaths every 100 accidents in 2012, which increased to 28.3 every 100 deaths in 2013.
“No dramatic shift has been witnessed in the accident data when we compare it with the previous year. But the silver lining is that for the first time in two consecutive years, i.e, in 2012 and 2013, we have seen a decline in the number of road accidents, the number of persons killed and the number of persons injured in road accidents,” said a senior official from the Ministry of Road, Transport and Highways.
“We are hopeful that 2014-15 will have lesser accidents, as we have undertaken an exercise to identify black spots (blind areas like sharp curves where accidents are very common) and fix them. Contractors and local police have been entrusted with the job and we are already getting improved figures,” he said.
The States of Tamil Nadu, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Karnataka, Andhra Pradesh, Kerala, Uttar Pradesh, Gujarat, Rajasthan, Chhattisgarh, West Bengal, Haryana and Bihar together accounted for 88.4 per cent of all road accidents in the country.
Tamil Nadu had the highest number of road accidents (66,238) and the highest number of people injured in road accidents (75,681) in 2013. lakshadweep reported the lowest number of road accidents at one and the lowest number of persons injured at two in 2013. While Uttar Pradesh had the highest number of road accident fatalities in 2013 (16,004), lakshadweep had no road accident fatalities in 2013.