It may soon become the norm to hold contractors and agencies responsible for road accidents due to potholes and faulty road design.
A report submitted by the Standing Committee before Parliament on Friday recommended that road contractors and concessionaires should be liable for accidents caused by their negligence.
“The committee notes that the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill, 2016, fails to address the issue of accidents caused by faulty road designs and non-maintenance of roads and the accountability of the same. The committee, therefore, recommends that a penalty provision (Section 198A) may be inserted in the Bill to hold road contractors and concessionaires accountable for faulty road design, construction and maintenance of roads,” read the recommendations submitted before Parliament.
As per data released by the Transport Research Wing of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, in the last five years, India has witnessed over 36,000 road crashes due to defect in road conditions. The mishaps resulted in the deaths of over 13,000 people and left over 35,000 seriously injured.
In 2016, 18 accidents were caused because of potholes and poor condition of roads in Delhi-NCR. Two people lost their lives.
Despite such jarring incidents, neither the Motor Vehicles Act (1988) nor the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Bill (2016) hold contractors accountable for faulty road designs.
Though there are sections in the Indian Penal Code (IPC), under which contractors can be booked for culpable homicide, or causing deaths due to negligence, in most cases such incidents are buried by registering a case of rash and negligent driving.
Road safety experts said that it is high time stringent penalties for faulty road designs and vehicle engineering are made part of the Motor Vehicles Act.
“When you can hold a driver responsible for negligence, then why should contractors and principal road agencies not be held responsible for ignoring the standards of road design, construction and maintenance,” asked Saji Cherian, the director (operations) of road safety NGO SaveLife Foundation.
The NGO has been battling to include accountability of agencies and contractors in the (Amendment) Bill, which was introduced in August last year.
A more comprehensive version of what the country is attempting now was done by the Netherlands in the 1990s.
The Institute of Road Safety Research in the Netherlands introduced the vision of sustainable safety. In the sustainably safe traffic system, road accidents are prevented as much as possible, and when prevention is not possible, the probability of severe injuries is reduced to almost zero.
In an email response to The Hindu , Wendy Whitman, road safety researcher and co-author of ‘The Transportation Research Record: Journal of the Transportation Research Board’, said strict laws were enforced in the Netherlands to ensure that infrastructure is improved to make roads safer for commuters.
Ms. Whitman said: “The fatality rates here decreased from 7.3 fatalities per billion kilometre travelled in 1998 to 4.7 per billion in 2007... It is estimated that together the measures prevented 300 to 400 fatalities in 2007 (32% to 34% fewer that expected) and 1,600 to 1,700 fatalities from 1998 through 2007. Finally, a benefit cost analysis indicates that the measures were also cost beneficial.”
Sweden has a similar initiative called, ‘Vision Zero’, where road systems are being developed to reduce accidents. The initiative proposes that the system should be first held responsible for any accident.
