March 23, 2016: The Indian government has set a target for reducing road accident fatalities by 50 per cent by 2020 and has taken several steps to prevent accidents.
Nitin Gadkari, the road transport and highways minister, told a parliamentary consultative committee of his ministry that the national road safety policy outlines various policy measures like promoting awareness, establishing road safety information data base, encouraging safer road infrastructure, enforcement of safety laws etc.
The ministry has also evolved a multi-pronged strategy to tackle the problem based on the 4 Es - Education, Engineering ( both of roads and vehicles) Enforcement and Emergency Care.
Road safety has been made an integral part of road designing, safety audits are being taken up for selected stretches of National Highways, around 700 accident black spots have been identified and remedial steps are being taken at such spots, said the minister.
The threshold for four laning of National Highways has been reduced from 15.000 Passenger Car Units (PCUs) to 10,000 and about 52,000 km of state highways are set to be converted into National Highways.
The government also plans to set up model driving training institutes in states and run publicity campaigns in print and electronic media.
NHAI also provides ambulances at a distance of 50 km on its completed stretches of National Highways. Pilot projects for cashless treatment of road accident victims have been started on Gurgaon-Jaipur and Vadodara – Mumbai stretch of NH 8 and Ranchi-Rargaon-Mahulia stretch of NH 33. The Ministry plans to extend this scheme to road accident victims on North-South corridor, East-West Corridor and Golden Quadrilateral, added Gadkari.
Source : BS Motoring