NEW DELHI: Union road transport minister
Nitin Gadkari on Monday lashed out at consultants preparing faulty detailed project reports (DPRs) and officials for accepting such reports, which result in road crashes and fatalities. He said both officials and consultants should be held responsible and cases should be lodged against them for deficiencies.
Launching 'Road Safety Good Practices in India', a study prepared by SaveLife Foundation, a non-profit organisation, and
World Bank, the minister said the compendium of successful practices on bringing down deaths shows that a mix of interventions, including engineering measures, can reduce road fatalities.
"It is a matter of great pain that we are losing many lives in road crashes," Gadkari said while citing the latest data of 1.68 lakh fatalities in 2022.
On the poor quality and deficient DPRs, the minister said, "We have bad quality and faulty DPRs prepared by consultants and our officers keep accepting them without asking questions. We need to hold them accountable and I feel we should file cases against such people."
The report highlights good practices such as the National Highway-48 (Old Mumbai-Pune Highway) which saw a 61% decrease in fatalities between 2018 and 2021. Similarly, Belgaum-Yaragatti highway in Karnataka recorded a 54% reduction in deaths between 2015 and 2018. The 400-km of Sabarimala Safe Zone around the holy temple in Kerala has maintained 'zero' road crash deaths between 2019 and 2021. In the case of Yamuna Expressway in
Uttar Pradesh, fatalities fell by 40% between 2016 and 2022.
"In each of these cases, a concerted effort was undertaken to analyse road crashes and take a 360-degree approach to address them. These include enhancement of road safety furniture on the road, effective and targeted enforcement, and improvement in emergency medical response," the report said.
The study also claimed that scaling successful corridor-based road safety practices can save as many as 40,000 lives each year. It has recommended that the interventions made in roads around Sabarimala Temple can be used on the Char Dham road network in Uttarakhand, which reports many fatalities every year.