During the inaugural session of ‘Traffic Management and Capacity Building Programme’ last Thursday, state DGP has shared the statistics that during last three years more than 175 people in Arunachal Pradesh had lost lives due to road accidents which means, on an average, once in six days someone had lost a dear or near one. This is really a chilling reality and for containing the figure from shooting up further, time has come to think over for a more robust mechanism over and above the existing one and most importantly, taking care of loopholes that might have caused this unsettling figure.

If there are more than one million deaths worldwide every year due to road accidents and 20 to 50 million people suffer from related injuries is a hard-to-digest figure, India being the topper accounting 11 % of the above deaths will be more distressing. As per the report on Road Accidents in India-2018 released by Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways in November 2019, there had been 467,044 cases of road accidents in 2018 which is 0.46% more compared to 2017 and coming to death figures, it is 151,417, which is an increase of 2.37% over 2017 and here, over-speeding has been found to be the principal contributor with as much as 64.4% share. Effectively, it means in every hour in 2018, 17 citizens died and 53 got injured and this is in spite of the continuing and increasing awareness campaigns from almost all levels, government, non-government and society at large. This is a paradox of the most weird form and the science of psychology has so far not been able to decode suitably the reasons behind this marked change of behavioural patterns that get hold of drivers so masterly which ‘inspires’ them to break traffic rules without a second thought. Finding no options left, the new Motor Vehicles Act 2019 had been introduced with hefty increase of penal provisions, perhaps as a last resort. It is commendable that despite uproars over this steep increase, government has shown determination and hadn’t gone for any dilution or rollback exercise.

For Arunachal, problems are all similar to national ones and for getting out, besides implementing the law in letter and spirit, awareness campaigns must attempt an inclusive approach that would touch most strata of the society and must be more repetitive so that a sustained effect remains all throughout the year. Having done this, an important task must also be to make the roads more communicable in terms of quality of construction and presence of improved traffic signal mechanism.

Whatever avenue that is feasible for the state must be tried and there must now be an end to this procession of deaths. 

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Kenter Joya Riba

(Managing Editor)
      She is a graduate in Science with post graduation in Sociology from University of Pune. She has been in the media industry for nearly a decade. Before turning to print business, she has been associated with radio and television.
Email: kenterjoyaz@easternsentinel.in / editoreasternsentinel@gmail.com
Phone: 0360-2212313

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