Comparing road accident deaths with other incidents, union minister Nitin Gadkari on Wednesday said that the mishaps killed more people than the wars with Pakistan and China or Naxals, communal riots, and law and order problems.
Speaking at the Sixth Edition of FICCI Road Safety Awards and Conclave 2024, Gadkari said that every year almost 1.5 lakh deaths are reported in India in road accidents, and almost 65% of the victims are young men and women. This is a loss of about three per cent of the GDP, he said.
“If you have calculated, be it wars, China or Pakistan, or Naxals or communal riots, or disruption in law and order situation, the highest number of people were killed in road accidents,” he said.
Gadkari blamed poor road engineering and poor detailed project planning (DPR) for the majority of these accidents.
“The DPR is made on Google and the lowest (bidder) gets the order. These DPRs are of very poor quality. They (engineers) have to check the construction but they don’t. They are only experts in tendering. There is no quality in the DPR. We have changed certain policies now. There are only a handful of companies that qualify for the tenders. I know they make DPR on Google,” he added.
He said awarding a tender to the lowest bidder is a limitation before the government and that needed to be rectified. “We need to find a way out,” said the road transport and highways minister.
‘Black spots increasing Like Lord Hanuman’s tail’
Gadkari went on to say that black spots keep increasing like the tail of Lord Hanuman.
“Say in the first phase we identified 6,000 black spots and soon there will be an additional 6,000 black spots, and soon there will be even more. These numbers never go down because the basic work is wrong,” he said.
Black spots are usually short stretches on a road where accidents and fatalities repeatedly take place.
These spots are created on the road network by a number of factors, including commissions and omissions in development projects and changes in the roadside environment. They also appear due to changes in developmental scenarios in the region, including unplanned and unauthorised constructions on and near the road.
‘Lost two years after road accident’
Recalling the incident where he met with a road accident while travelling with his family, back in 2001, he said that he lost two years of his life because of the mishap.
“I met with an accident and my leg got fractured in four places. I was travelling in a red-light car with a police siren. There were six police cars (in the convoy). My wife and children were there. I lost two years in that,” he said.
The driver had hit a parked truck on the road. The minister said the government driver had cataracts. Following this incident, he asked the public works department to check the eyes of all drivers in the Maharashtra government.
“At least 45% (of drivers) had cataracts. One CM told me his driver was blind in both eyes while one union minister said his driver was blind in one eye and was driving based on sounds,” he said while highlighting the loopholes in getting a fitness certificate for drivers.
Gadkari said he could give in writing that if checked, “almost 50% of drivers in government will have cataracts because there is no check on this. This (eye checkup of drivers) should be done as this is one of the reasons for road accidents.”
Gadkari called for a collective effort from various stakeholders to improve road quality and implementation of road discipline for bringing down road accidents and related deaths.
Comments
0 comment