Road accident deaths cross 4,000 mark

 Trivendram,February3 2012: Road accidents are a major cause of death and injuries throughout the world. While they are declining in the developed world, fatalities are still on the rise in the state which matches the developed countries in human development index.The accidents claimed as many as 4098 lives in the state in the 2011 calendar year. This works out to an average of 12 deaths a day. This is the first time that the road accident deaths in the state have crossed 4000. The fatality in 2010 was 3950. Spurred by the statistics, the authorities have swung into action to check the rising accidents. As usual the thrust is on ensuring compliance with traffic regulations. A crackdown against drunken driving is the major component of the fresh measures recommended by the police. The Directorate General of Police (DGP) has sought to take on drunken drivers with non-bailable arrests and cancellation of license. Unfortunately, there is no provision in the law to cancel the license of drunken drivers. A determined police chief has sought an amendment in the law to overcome the problem. However experts doubt whether this will be worth the efforts as deaths due to drunken driving is very negligible. The statistics released by the police themselves reveal that out of 35, 082 accidents reported during 2010, only 68 accounted for drunken driving. The detailed statistics of the accidents in 2011 are not immediately available. However, the police statistics for the first six months of the year show that only 49 out of 17917 accidents between January-June 2011 were caused by drunken driving. The statistics further revealed that drunken driving was not the cause of any road accident in six districts during the period.
Rash driving has been identified as the major cause for the accidents by the police. But road safety experts say that majority of accidents in the State were due to bad condition of roads. Curiously, the police have not included accidents due to bad road condition in their statistics. The experts say that actions based on wrong premises may not bring down the accidents. They say that accidents can be brought down only by improving the condition of roads and checking the rapid growth in the vehicle population. National Transportation Planning and Research Centre (Natpac) director B G Sreedevi, who has been entrusted with the task of preparing a road development plan for the 12th Five Year Plan, says that the current roads cannot sustain 6.5 million vehicles registered in the State. Though the condition of the roads remained the same, half a million vehicles were being added in the State every year. Sreedevi says this has been leading to major traffic congestion in urban roads and highways. The available road capacity is limited by the unscientific parking of vehicles and encroachment by hawkers, vendors, petty shops and workshops. Even though the road length in the state is higher than that of the country as a whole, the overall quality of roads is much below the prescribed standard set forth by the Indian Road Congress (IRC), according to the State Planning Board. Kerala has 145,704kms of roads, which is 4.2 per cent of the country’s total road length. This translates to about 4.62kms of road per thousand population compared to an all India average of 2.59kms. Although all villages in the state are connected by roads, the Natpac director says about 95 per cent of the local roads do not have even single lane width to allow for bus services and those are mostly not properly surfaced. Sreedevi said that the roads maintained by the Public Works Department were not safe to use during bad weather conditions. The experts feel that the state should plan for better and safer expressways and highways to reduce the accidents. The state government has been trying to upgrade existing roads and develop new roads through build-operate-transfer mode but strong resistance against tolls by the local people has brought the developments to standstill.