“Send a police officer or a constable in mufti to the house where death of the bread-winner in a road accident is reported. Only then we will understand how a road accident can devastate a family.”
This was the opening remark of Director General of Police N. Sambasiva Rao at the inauguration of the two-day workshop on ‘Training for trainers on road safety,’ here on Friday.
“Till now, we have been observing and recording road accidents as any other normal crime. We have never focussed on the repercussions on a family. Henceforth, it will not be the case, as we own up the cause of the accident. We have mooted a number of interventions, including the use of technology, to reduce fatalities by 50% by 2020 as per the Brasilia resolution on reduction of fatal accidents on the road,” he said.
According to Mr. Sambasiva Rao, of the 1.10 lakh cases that are registered across the State every year, over 25,000 pertain to road accidents with about 8,000 fatalities.
“This is a very high figure. Of the fatalities, 18% are women and 82% are men, who are mostly bread winners of a family. The statistics has moved the Chief Minister and the department, and the focus has now shifted to road safety,” he said.
Road safety vehicles
Mr. Sambasiva Rao advised the senior officers to be innovative and design as many interventions as necessary to bring down the accident rate.
Speaking to The Hindu , he said: “To begin with, the Chief Minister has allotted 126 new road safety vehicles across the 13 districts, exclusively for National Highway 16. We have about 21 National Highways and State Highways running through the State. Our target is to enhance the number to 1,000 vehicles in a year’s time. Besides enforcing road rules, personnel manning these vehicles will take steps to save a life by promptly attending to the victim during the golden one hour period.”
The Chief Minister had already sanctioned ₹25 crore for the project and allowed us to use 40% of the challan fines for the cause, he added. Extensive use of cameras and IT will also be part of the interventions, according to him.
“We have plans to install 25,000 cameras across the State for real time monitoring. We have developed Apps and instructed all the officers to upload details of the accidents with pictures so that we can analyse and devise methods to prevent them. The workshop is meant to educate the officers on IT initiatives,” said Mr. Sambasiva Rao.
‘Book cases under IPC too’
Apart from interventions, the police are all set to scale up enforcement by a couple of grades higher.
The DGP advised the senior officers to not only book cases against erring drivers, including drunk drivers and driving on the wrong route, under the MV Act, but also book them under IPC Section 279 for rash driving.
“We have identified about 11,000 black spots and are talking to the authorities concerned such as the NHAI and civic bodies to do some road engineering to rectify the defects. About 40% of the accidents occur at ‘T’ and ‘Y’ junctions on the NH,” he said.
E. Damodar, IG, Tech Services and Legal, pointed out that road accidents would have a cascading effect and it affects 3% of the GDP.
“Our focus is to dive deep into the cause of the accidents so that they can be prevented with real time governance,” he said.
Commissioner of Police, Visakhapatnam, T. Yoganand, GVMC Commissioner M. Hari Narayanan, and VUDA vice-chairman P. Basanth Kumar were present.
