Carnage on Roads

At a time when road safety weeks are being organised across Assam, mishaps and fatalities due to rash driving and unsafe roads continue to occur in distressing frequency. As many as 10 lives were lost in two road accidents on Wednesday, seven of them on NH 31 near Bongaigaon due to a truck-tempo collision and three near Dokmoka in Karbi Anglong district when a speeding Innova crashed into a bridge pillar. On Sunday last, 4 members of a family perished when their car was hit by a bus on NH 37 near Demow in Sivasagar district. Less than a month back, three teachers of CKB College in Teok died near Dergaon when their Scorpio collided with an oil tanker as they were returning from a varsity youth festival in Golaghat. Such tragic incidents are the regular staple in our dailies, and it is when figures are collated on monthly/yearly basis that the magnitude of the toll hits home. On average, over 1.5 lakh lives are lost on the country’s killer roads every year; Assam, in terms of size and population, suffers a disproportionate toll of road accident fatalities. As per Ministry of Road Transport & Highways data, the number of fatalities on Assam roads increased from 3,262 in 2003 to 5,828 in 2010 to 7,435 in 2016 (the highest in this 13 year period). Overall, the casualty rate in the country is so alarming (described as equivalent to wiping out of one small city like Gangtok or Darjeeling every year), that India in 2015 signed the Brasilia declaration committing to reduce by half till year 2020 the number of road accidents and fatalities. Compared to 2016, the number of road accidents in the country in 2017 did come down by 3.27% to 4,64,910, and there was also a 1.9% drop in fatalities to 1,47,913 — but that is hardly reassuring, more so when most of the dead are in the working age group. One aspect that must also be kept in mind is ‘accident severity’, the number of deaths per 100 road mishaps — it was 31.4% for the country in 2016. While over-speeding and drunken driving are major reasons most driver errors occur, the number of accidents and fatalities is magnified due to ignorance or flouting of safety rules, automakers failing to put in basic safety features in their products, and poor engineering design by road building agencies.

Road safety drives in Assam harp on the ‘4Es’ mantra — education, enforcement, engineering and emergency care. While the procedure for granting driving licenses has been significantly tightened, it is nowhere near drilling the awareness of safety rules among drivers. Considering the elementary mistakes many drivers make, resulting in entirely avoidable mishaps, they never learnt the ABC of driving! Not only do these people endanger themselves and others behind the wheel, they are a menace to pedestrians who also die in large numbers in road accidents. Enforcement of road safety rules by the traffic police remains desultory and perfunctory. It is doubtful whether the State government has a good estimate about the number of ‘black spots’ on at least the State roads, let alone rectifying these urgently (like sharp curves and visibility barriers that can make drivers lose sight of obstacles and oncoming vehicles). Most government hospitals in the districts lack emergency trauma facilities to deal with accident victims, and highway ambulance services are spotty. The load is mainly borne by the stretched 108 Mrityunjoy service, while hospital ambulance services are even more neglected than before. For all these reasons, most critically injured people die on the way to referral hospitals in Guwahati and Dibrugarh. All these factors need to be urgently looked into, so that the State government does something concrete to reduce the carnage on the roads.