Road mishaps in Telangana down a tad from last year
Accident cases, fatalities fewer but still high, says road safety authority.
Hyderabad: Road accidents in Telangana have come down to 22,475 accidents in 2017 from 22,811 accidents in 2016 shows statistics by Telangana Road Safety authorities. With a few preventive measures, the state government has reduced fatalities and accidents, from 7,219 fatalities in 22,811 accidents in 2016; and fatalities reduced to 6,595 from 22,475 road accidents in the year 2017.
A large number of gadgets such as laser guns, breath analysers, surveillance cameras and cranes have been acquired to increase the enforcement work, according to the road safety authorities. The road safety authorities also took various measures like creating awareness against drunken driving, over loading, no-helmet drving, over speeding, mobile-phone driving and implementation of point-penalty system to reduce the road accidents.
Mr Panduranga Naik, Joint Transport Commissioner Hyderabad told the newspaper ‘’ As per the statistics about 5 lakhs accidents are happening in India every year, among which 1.5 lakh people are dying every year due to road accidents. Road accidents stand on sixth position among the top 10 reasons of deaths across the world’’.
He further added, ‘’The Indian govt has set a target of reduction of 50 per cent in road accidents by 2020. Due to our relentless efforts and quick enforcement a reduction of 4 percent road accidents in Telangana state when compared to the year 2016 to 2017. Telangana govt also aims 50 per cent reduction of road accidents by the year 2020. Though it’s a very big challenge but we will achieve it my strict enforcement and awareness’’.
Mr C. Ramesh, Joint Transport Commissioner (IT Wing and Vigilance) told the newspaper, ‘’Reduction of road accidents is a result of comibation of better enforcement, awareness of the traffic rules, implementation of Point system for license suspension and effective enforcement of drunken driving by the traffic police officials. Similarly engineering measures to identify and correction of black spots and careful driving has also resulted in reduction of road accidents and reduction of deaths due to the fatal road accidents’’.
Mr Anil Kumar, Additional Traffic Commissioner-Hyderabad traffic police told the newspaper, ‘’Last year the road accidents 22 percent in Hyderabad city limits, this year 25 percent reduction have been observed in the road accidents upto April 2018.
Active enforcement is being done by the traffic police and transport departments. We have also done some road engineering last year in collaboration of GHMC and identified few blackspots and rectified the black spots to curb the road accidents and we have also incresed enforcements for drunken driving and other traffic violationslike helmet driving and over speeding’’.