New road policy aims to cut road mishaps by 80per cent

New Delhi: In a bid to bring down the number of accidents taking place in the national capital by at least ten per cent, the Delhi government has notified the Road Safety Policy for the national capital. Touted as the first of its kind road safety policy for any state, the policy envisions to reduce the road accidents and fatalities by 30 per cent by 2020 and 80 per cent by 2025.

This will pave the way for every fatal road accident in Delhi to go through a scientific investigation within three months to zero in area-specific traffic problems and road engineering defects that may have caused it.

The policy makes it mandatory to provide road safety training to all government staff and the traffic police, every two years. The policy will call for the mandatory scientific investigation of every fatal road accident in Delhi and the corrective action within six months to prevent further crashes.

The Delhi Road Safety Policy, which was earlier approved by the state transport minister Kailash Gahlot, wants the police, transport department and road operators to reduce accidents and fatalities by 30 per cent by 2020 and by 80 per cent by 2025. Now that the policy is notified, the transport department would set up a special teams at the state and district levels to conduct scientific accident investigations using simulation techniques.

The policy mandates training every two years for all officials, starting from junior engineers to chief engineers and police officers. Speaking on this, K Ravinder, an official in the transport planning division of the Central Road Research Institute said, “The problem is, there is no capacity-building workshops because of which the expertise that the police has is not shared by government road engineers and vice versa. Every officer involved in building and maintaining roads and traffic needs holistic training at regular intervals.”

He also added, “Once notified, it will be mandatory for road owning agencies and traffic police to digitise the database of all black spots in the city and check their real-time status. The list of such spots along with accident-prone areas will have to be updated every six months on the basis of severity.”

The policy has been put up in the public domain for feedback. As per the road safety policy, agencies will have to conduct anti-encroachment drives to clear carriageways and pedestrian walkways, where one such drive was conducted on Friday on stretches of the Mehrauli-Badarpur Road, Andheria Mod and Chirag Dilli were removed by the south district administration.

The notification dated July 13 said that the Delhi government is highly concerned to prevent road accidents, injuries and fatalities on the city’s roads. Road accidents, it said, have also become a public health issue which has affected all. including pedestrians, cyclists, motorists etc. Also, the road accident victims mostly belong to the poorer sections of the society, being pedestrians, cyclists, motorists etc. “The Delhi government recognizes that the road safety demands an integrated and a holistic approach to tackle the issues of road safety in the NCT of Delhi.

The Delhi government observes that the reduction in road accidents, injuries and fatalities is a shared responsibility of the Delhi government and the Central government. Hence it requires adequate support from the Central government,” the notification said.

During the year 2016, 7,375 road accidents were reported in Delhi in which 7,154 people were injured and 1,591 people lost their lives. Data indicates that 42.86 per cent of the persons killed in road accidents were pedestrians. Scooter/motorcycle riders were the second most vulnerable victims constituting 35.9 per cent of the total fatalities. The government data points that the road accidents tend to increase from 8 pm to 2 am. National highways and major roads of the city are more accident prone due to heavy movement of the commercial vehicles as well as other vehicles.