Activist blames the authorities who fail to enforce rules on the traffic. As per the traffic police’s latest statistics, accessed by road safety activist Sundeep Sharma, in the first 4 months of 2011, there were 1037 accidents in the city.
The extended road safety campaign organised by the state government early this year seems to have not had any noteworthy effect on the city’s accidents scenario. Accidents continue to be unabated on the city streets.
As per the traffic police’s latest statistics, accessed by road safety activist Sundeep Sharma, in the first 4 months of 2011, there were 1037 accidents in the city. These accidents injured 1160 individuals and killed 208 in the Mumbai district.
Unlike the officials, Sharma put the blame for road accidents on the authorities who fail to enforce rules on the traffic. As per the official version, most accidents are believed to occur as a result of human error-negligence on the part of the motorists. However, he said that it is essential to look at the issue holistically. Drivers do not get proper training at the driving schools and tests for driving licenses are conducted only on paper at the regional transport offices.
“I am going to submit a fact sheet to the government detailing the present problems concerning driving schools and how they could be improved by framing a detailed course and list of essential facilities that the schools will have to provide,” he said.
In recent years, even as the numbers of motor vehicles has shot up substantially, road length has failed to catch up because of its obvious limitations. The state government and several policy experts feel promotion of public transport is one of the solutions for theproblem of accident deaths.
A recent report had stated that roads in Mumbai were highly accident-prone, and topped the country with 34.11% mishaps on its 1,899-km roads. Even the state home minister RR Patil had said early this year that, every year, 12,000 people in Maharashtra are killed in road accidents — the second biggest cause of death after natural death — while 25,000 people are injured permanently.
There were 23,440 road accidents in Mumbai between January and December 2010, as per official statistics. Every day, at least one person in Mumbai dies and at least 13 are injured in road accidents. But the rate of deaths in road accidents has come down by 11% in 2010-2011; 549 were killed in the above period. The number of people injured was 4,896, a decrease of 25%.
The World Health Organisation said recently that India suffers from the highest number of deaths - around 1,05,000 in absolute terms annually-due to road accidents in the world owing to poor infrastructure and dangerous driving habits.
Poor road infrastructure, failure to comply with speed limits, growing drinking and driving habits, and refusal to use proper motorcycle helmets and use child car seats, are among the main factors contributing to deaths from road crashes, WHO said in its report on ‘Decade of Action for Road Safety 2011-2010’.
Despite strong laws and regulations, India has been unable to prevent the growing number of accidents on its roads. With around 1,05,000 death annually, the country has overtaken China.
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