Sharp rise in fatalities on the road

More people are dying on Indian roads than they were eight years ago, with small towns seeing a sharp rise in such fatalities, a study submitted to the Planning Commission said, Chetan Chauhan reports.

Updated on: Mar 10, 2009, 24:09:26 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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More people are dying on Indian roads than they were eight years ago, with small towns seeing a sharp rise in such fatalities, a study submitted to the Planning Commission said.

Lack of law enforcement against high speed and drink driving had driven up the accident death rate by around eight per cent since 2000, said Dinesh Mohan of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi. Mohan is the lead author of the study conducted for the University of Michigan.

The findings were released on Monday at a meeting of officials entrusted with the job of road safety.

Even though the number of vehicles per 100 people was very low in India, deaths per one lakh people were much higher when compared with European countries and Japan.

The study also found that congested inter-city roads and state highways, and not the national highways, accounted for a majority of such deaths.

“Close to 70 per cent of people who die on Indian roads are two-wheeler riders, cyclists and pedestrians,” Mohan said. He blamed absence of pedestrian pathway and separate corridor for slow-moving traffic for it.

All states except Manipur, Mizoram and Nagaland recorded a steady rise in deaths due to road accidents since 2000. In Delhi, the accident rate per 1,000 people has fallen despite an increase in the number of vehicles.

Among big cities, Agra had the highest rate of accidents (317) per one million, the number for Delhi was 140. The lowest rate (33) was for Amritsar. “The average rate of fatalities - 98 per million - for million plus cities in India is 45 per cent higher than in the US,” the report said.

The ministry of road transport is likely to constitute a road safety board after elections, a plan panel official said.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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