Taking serious note of the 14,936 deaths caused due to potholes in five years across the country, an expert committee assisting the Supreme Court on Road Safety wants contractors or the road owning agency to be made criminally or financially liable for the deaths. Three states accounted for over 50 per cent of deaths due to potholes — Uttar Pradesh (4,415), Maharashtra (2,136), and Madhya Pradesh (1,385).
On July 20, 2018, the apex court had asked an expert committee chaired by former SC judge Justice (Retd) KS Radhakrishnan to take up the issue after being alarmed by the rising pothole-related deaths. The committee identified eight states accounting for more than four per cent of deaths due to potholes. The experts spoke to the concerned officials on September 4. The states which attended the meeting included Uttar Pradesh, Maharashtra, Madhya Pradesh, Gujarat, West Bengal, Bihar, Tamil Nadu, and Andhra Pradesh.
Attaching the minutes of the meeting, the committee in its preliminary report to the SC stated that that to compensate victims of road accidents, a mechanism was needed to either hold the contractor liable or punish the officials from the Public Works Department (PWD) or the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI).
Currently, a road contractor comes with a clause binding the contractor for a fixed period to maintain the roads. He can be blacklisted for default but cannot be held criminally or financially liable. At the state level, there exists no protocol to inspect and identify potholes and get them repaired to keep the road in good condition.
Worse still, victims of pothole deaths do not have a scheme for compensation as it is difficult to determine how the pothole resulted in a person's death.
A notification of Ministry of Road Transport and Highways dated May 22, 2018 does provide for a lump sum of Rs five lakh for fatal accident victims, but it is yet to be applied for pothole-related deaths. The states informed that they had insufficient funds to maintain roads. They mentioned that even they supported the May 2018 notification for victims of pothole-related deaths.
Based on these inputs, the committee gave states a month's time to report their views on fixing the liability on the road owning agencies/engineers/contractors on the question of payment of compensation including the quantum. Accepting the committee's report, the SC bench of Justices Madan B Lokur and Deepak Gupta directed the committee to furnish its final report by first week of November.
The bench found it strange why states cried of fund crunch when the job of maintaining roads was on them. Some states even disputed the death toll but the SC dismissed their claims. Directing its anger at the states, which readily opened purse strings for contractors but do nothing to improve the roads, the bench remarked: "Sadak kachhi toh naukri pakki (if the roads are bad, contractors' job becomes easy). This is true of Indian roads."
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