After the success of cashless road accident treatment project on the Gurgaon-Jaipur highway, the Road Ministry is working on launching the programme in two more highway stretches in Jharkhand and Maharashtra-Gujarat.
The Ministry has given a go-ahead to start cashless road accident treatments along 352 km long Ranchi-Jamshedpur (NH-33) and 331 km stretch between Vadodara and Mumbai (NH-8). “Since the Minister has already approved the next two pilot projects on cashless treatment of road accident victims, expeditious action should be taken to launch the two projects at the earliest,” said Vijay Chibber, secretary, Ministry of Roads, Transport and Highways (MoRTH).
“We feel that more investment in road safety was warranted keeping in view the gravity of problem; in 2011, whereas 1,399 people were killed in terrorist attacks and in comparison 1,42,465 people lost their lives in road accidents. Even in 2012, over 4.9 lakh accidents occurred on roads, of which we lost over 1.38 lakh lives. Data shows that close to 1.23 lakh were fatal,” he said.
In just about two months since the launch of cashless treatment of road accident on the Delhi-Gurgaon-Jaipur stretch which claims close to 250 lives annually — data with MoRTH shows that over 300 accidents were attended by ambulances within 11 minutes after a crash was reported. Data shows that more than 110 patients received cashless treatment in private empanelled hospitals. “The Ministry with ICICI lombard had set a limit of bearing medical expenses cost up to Rs 30,000 in the first 48 hours of accident. The average claim so far is around Rs 10,363. We now plan to roll out the scheme in more accident prone stretches,” said a senior official in the Ministry.
With an initial corpus of Rs 20 crore provided by the Roads Ministry and the private insurance company providing back end support for managing the control room, which involves monitoring ambulances and tying up with hospitals to provide the “golden period” treatment, the Centre is hoping to reduce deaths on highways by at least 50 per cent.
Under the scheme, cashless treatment of up to Rs 30,000 would be provided to the victims during the first two days of treatment at 51 hospitals identified on the route at CGHS rates. According to the official, a tall challenge ahead of the Ministry is to make the toll free number (1033) more popular among road users so that they could easily report an incident to the dedicated call centre. According to different surveys, if road crash victims are shifted to hospital and proper medication is provided in the first hour, fatalities can be brought down by 50 per cent.