With the 16th LS adjourned sine die on Wednesday, over three dozen Bills, including those related to amending the Motor Vehicle Act are set to lapse. It may mentioned here that Motor Vehicle Amendment Bill has lapsed twice in seven years. Given the seriousness of the issue, the Road Safety Network has the government to bring an ordinance on Road Safety.
On February 14, a day after the last session of the current Lok Sabha, the Road Safety Network had written to the Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari, to bring an Ordinance on Road Safety.
The Motor Vehicles Amendment Bill, 2017 that sought to carry out the much-required overhaul of the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988 had received the assent of the Lok Sabha on 10th April 2017 and was introduced for consideration and passage in Rajya Sabha in the winter Session of 2017. However, after the failure to get the bill passed, the network urged the government to take the extraordinary measure of issuing an ordinance to save lives.
Piyush Tewari of SaveLIFE Foundation said: “The Transport Minister was committed to bringing a strong road safety law following the demise of Gopinath Munde in a road crash in 2014. Since his efforts in Parliament to pass the Motor Vehicles Amendment Bill have not been successful, we urge the minister to issue an Ordinance in the interim on this important issue”. India has the dubious distinction of being world number one in road crash deaths. Every year nearly 1.5 lakh people are killed in road crashes and another 5 lakh are severely injured, many of them disabled for life. The Motor Vehicles Amendment Bill, 2017 was aimed to tackle this pandemic by strengthening Road Safety policy framework in the country through introduction of various provisions related to road safety such as stricter penalties for egregious violations and the ability to hold road contractors liable for defective designs and poor maintenance of roads.
India is a signatory to the Brasilia Declaration, where the country made a commitment to reduce road crash deaths by 50% by 2020. The deadline is fast approaching, and India is nowhere close to meeting the target, said George Cheriyan, Director, CUTS International.
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