The National Road Safety Council will lead the path on road safety guidelines for the State as about in a month’s time the council is likely to suggest measures imperative to introduce to avoid road accident deaths and cut down the number of casualty to one-fourth of the total figure reported annually.
The council set up under the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways is focusing on Jharkhand to spot key areas of improvement to reduce deaths due to road mishap by 20-25 per cent by 2016. Member of the council, Kamal Soi called upon the Transport Minister and officials of the department to prepare a policy for road safety that would be put in practice to achieve the end result.
“We are designing a road safety policy which we will share with the State Government in about a month’s time. I had interacted with Minister Transport and Secretary, Ratan Kumar. We want to reduce deaths by at least 20 per cent by 2016,” said Soi.
Notably, 5000-6000 road accidents are reported annually in Jharkhand which lead to 3000-3500 deaths annually. Of the total incidents, around 40-45 per cent is caused by heavy vehicles even as lack of enforcement, missing fear of law, drunken driving, over speeding also contribute to the tally of accidents and deaths due to this. The policy would focus to bring down casualty figure to 2000-2500 by the end of 2016 with targeted intervention that the policy will suggest.
The policy could focus on educating man, taming machine, finding mediums of transport, better management of road safety and above all emphasizing on the need to have a prompt, responsive and effective medical system to provide timely relief to accident victims.
Significantly, the council’s expert on road safety would also be conducting a survey to identify places that has become notorious for accidents due to sheer number of incidents to have taken place and a plan will be made to remove fear of those spots among highway commuters. The process of identifying such spots is part of the ambitious project of the Ministry which is being conducted simultaneously in other parts of the country as well.
“There are around 14,000 black spots in the country on roads. We have come to identify those places in Jharkhand also and then we will see what could be done at such spots,” added the council member.
The council also suggested the department of Transport to adopt Karnataka model for monitoring speed governors for commercial vehicles to regulate vehicle speed. The department, a few days back, issued a circular, asking commercial vehicle owners to install speed governors in their vehicle by April 1. The circular aims at reducing accidents by regulating vehicle speed through the device.