Road accidents are an outcome of the interplay of various factors, some of which areblack spots, wrong driving practices, road infrastructure, vehicular defects, road types, damage overloading issues, other factors causing to road accidents. Road accident causes injuries, fatalities, disabilities and hospitalization with severe socio economic costs across the state. Consequently, road safety has become an issue of concern at state, national and international level. Each year, about three to five percent of the country’s GDP is invested in road accidents. Notably, India has 1% of the world’s vehicles but accounts for 6% of road traffic accidents, according to a 2018 World Health Organization (WHO) report. The national highways alone claim one life a year for every two kilometres. This is ten times higher than the developed country threshold. Almost 70 percent of the accidents involved young Indians.India has one of the highest rates of road crashes in the world. Every year, about 150,000 people lose their lives on India’s roads, and more than five times that number are injured or maimed for life.
Cases and causes :Two-wheelers had the maximum involvement in fatal road accidents across the country. A major portion of the accidents that year occurred at T-junctions, Sharp Curves, zigzag roads, treacherous passes and high altitude motorways. Over speeding& Rash driving has been a cause for concern throughout the country regardless of day or night-time. Moreover, fast and risky manoeuvres and illegal street races on roads and highways not designed for the purpose created significant trouble for the police. Over 65 percent of the accidents occurred on straight roads. Additionally, state highways had a share of about 25 percent of the total road accidents. In 2019 alone, Jammu & Kashmir reported around 996 fatalities & more than 7532 people were injured due to road accidents as per official data of JK Traffic Police. Jammu District is topping the list with 119 killed and 1343 people were injured followed by Ramban District with 91 killed and 313 people injured. In Kashmir Division, Srinagar was on top with 45 fatalities and 323 injuries. In 2020, till May available data according to official figures, 233 fatalities and 2008 injuries were reported in Jammu & Kashmir UT. In order to make roads safer and secure for travel, J&K Government came up with the establishment of GIS Based Road Accident Data Management System (RADMS) which is an automated software-based solution for road-accident data which has been developed by National Institute of Electronics and Information Technology (NIELIT), J&K, in accordance with the standardized format of the Indian Road Congress (IRC). RADMS is a Geographical Information System (GIS) solution for identification of black spots, wrong driving practices, road infrastructure, vehicular defects, road types, damage to property, overloading issues, driver issues, and other factors causing or related to road accidents. This system also facilitates for plotting of accident data on digital maps enabling in-depth spatial analysis. RADAMS Control Room at Jammu has been made functional in February 2020.
Another Application was launched as JK RideSafe Application back in 2019. The application was to help strengthen safe driving practices ride by reporting of the unsafe and reckless driving public transport vehicles. JK Ride Safe App was to provide safe ride, reporting unsafe driving offences in public passenger vehicles. The users would get a timely response on action taken by field officials. The reporting would immediately be shared with officials of Motor Vehicles Department for swift action. JK Ride Safe Application was integrated with government Dashboard for showing the statistics analysis of reported cases and action taken reports. But since this application on ground has become useless now as the dashboard portal is out of domain and officials have not taken this application seriously. Regarding the RADMS Application only recording data and identifying black spots is not enough to reduce the accidents unless people are made aware of road safety rules with collaboration of NGOs, Colleges, Schools, Universities and other platforms. Every year J&K Government releases Road Safety Funds for various road safety schemes, setting up trauma centres, purchasing relevant vehicles and traffic gadgets (speed-measuring laser guns, breath analyser and e-challan machines.) besides conducting studies aimed at lessening traffic hazards. Citizens should make them self-aware of the road safety rules and should abide the rules .Every year Road Safety Council meetings are held which are to review the status of road accidents and its measures taken to reduce the level. In 2018, JK Road Safety Council in our UT likewise in other states & UT’s was formulated on the recommendation of Supreme Court Guidelines which were to be implemented to reduce the road accidents fatalities in India by 50% in 2020 with target. Same is the case with Road Safety Week which is held every year throughout country to create awareness among citizens, stakeholders and drivers to implement road safety etiquettes and traits. The current approach followed in Jammu and Kashmir is Vehicle Oriented Approach (VOA), whereas, the rise in the traffic congestion problems show that this is not a fundamental approach and People Oriented Approach (POA) is strongly recommended at the planning stage to solve the problem sustainably. Instead of increasing the road capacity by road widening, underpasses, flyover, etc., there is a need to adopt the optimization techniques in traffic management and focus should be on decreasing the traffic volume. As a matter of concern, UT is heading towards the vehicular population explosion also due to excessive registration of new vehicles. In Srinagar District alone, 18,135 vehicles were registered in 2019, 2017 was 26,690 Vehicles which were registered and saw growth of 51%.Rise in prices of Vehicles due to BSVI Compliant engine and due to the extra cost incurred for the transition from BSIV to BSVI compliant engine, people are still hyper to buy new vehicles because most of people now doing ding dong battles on car craze with most of houses are filled with 4-5 cars and people do not have space to fill the basic amenities, but they need cars even they might go to their bathrooms in car, on note as joke.There should be some policy on Vehicle Population explosion as back in 2019, Ministry of road, transport& highways was stressing on rapid transition to electric & hybrid vehicles and banning petrol & diesel vehicles but automobile industry is at crossroads with the internal combustion engine. Emphasis should be laid on various sustainable modes of transportation like walkability, bicycling, Non-Motorized Transportation (NMT), water transportation, Bus Rapid Transportation System (BRTS), etc. More Stress should be on Electric Vehicles and Hybrid Vehicles as GST on electric vehicles has been reduced to 5 per cent from 12 per cent. It would be wise to leapfrog by considering the condition of developed cities that have already faced and overcome this problem. One of the best examples of such developed nations is Netherlands, where remarkable changes have been observed in the liveability and mobility after adopting the sustainable transportation systems.
References:
1. Parivahan Dashboard (https://vahan.parivahan.gov.in/vahan4dashboard/)
2. JK Traffic Police Website for road accidents data.
3. Times of India.
(The author is a freelancer. Views are his own)