Road Safety in India

Road Safety in India

#SSC-CGL2018 #SSC-CHSL2018 #IB #SBI-PO  (250 words)Important Topics for SSC, IB, BANK

Growing urbanisation and poverty alleviation has brought some drastic consequences in our daily life. Untoward incidents like a road accident are one of those many. An NCRB report(2016) shows 377 people die and 1214 accidents occur every day. The high morbidity and mortality associated with this is alarming and exploding. 

Asymmetric planning and lack of public safety regulations are responsible for this. Given that to mitigate public need many highways are built around villages that raise the risk of villagers and animals to get caught in the way of speedy vehicles and alcohol outlets around the highway give rise to drunken driving. Although built to curb such incidents flyovers and elevated roads lack the basic touch of the local situation. People try to overtake highways instead of using those. The absence of signalling and traffic guards do the rest. Lack of an acrimonious licensing system gives an advantage to novice and unruly drivers a chance to ruin public safety. Fragmented responsibility for the road maintenance also gives rise to danger. Public apathy to render help to accident victims and lack of emergency facilities in suburban hospitals increase the mortality rate. 

Although we have overcome issues in time lot but a lot to be done. We have adequate laws to prevent such incidents and punish offenders but lack of implementations make things complex. Public safety is a challenging issue so a combination of legislative swiftness, administrative compliance and education of pedestrians and drivers are necessary to check and curb road accident.