Highway accidents

A series of major road accidents on Assam’s National Highways which took place in the last  few days have brought several issues to the fore. Road accidents are a major crisis in Assam, ranking as the leading cause of unnatural deaths. Official reports say 4,219 road accidents took place in Assam in the first quarter of 2026, leading to 1,008 deaths, thus averaging about 11 fatalities per day. Between 2019 and 2023, Assam recorded over 36,800 accidents resulting in over 15,000 deaths. Violation of traffic rules and failure to maintain safety norms have been identified as the major causes of the rising number of road accidents. Over-speeding and wrong-lane driving are also other major factors. While the highways have improved drastically in the past few years, there do exist a lot of gaps in road engineering, apart from poor vehicle management. The Guwahati-Nagaon stretch of the National Highway, for instance, looks good. But when one drives on it, one can easily understand that it is not a smooth road to drive on. Moreover, the absence of service roads except in a few patches has caused smaller and slow-moving local vehicles as well as bicycles, handcarts, battery rickshaws and even pedestrians to use the four-lane highway. Letting domestic animals – cattle and goats – on the National Highways is a common sight, and the concerned authorities have simply failed to apply legal provisions to penalise the owners and confiscate the animals and send them to pounds. As far as reckless driving is concerned, it has almost become the order of the day, with a large section of people resorting to overspeeding without bothering for their own safety. Yet another issue is that most such major incidents take place during the unholy hours. In one recent incident in which three young men met death near Amingaon, no one has yet asked what exactly the three men were out for past midnight. A similar accident in the Narangi area in April took the lives of three women, again in the wee hours, when they actually had no business moving around at that point in time. Society has to ask these questions more often.