Road safety has long been a pressing concern in the country and rightly so! After all, our history in this context hasn’t been great. This discussion, unfortunately, revolved primarily on bad driving habits and our shameless disregard for traffic laws in India. On the other hand, road users in India, put the blame squarely at the government, saying that it is the lack of robust infrastructure that continues to drive India’s poor road safety record. Truth be told, both of them are right as well as wrong; right, because these two factors indeed play a crucial role in road safety. And wrong because they are not the only factors. And in a refreshing change, Nitin Gadkari, Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises, Government of India, agreed. Well, somewhat.
According to a PTI report, Gadkari, during Question Hour in the Lok Sabha, said, “Drivers and vehicles are not alone responsible for the large number of accidents which take place in the country every year. Road engineering is also responsible for many accidents.” Indeed Minister, indeed!
So, how are we going to deal with this problem then? Gadkari said that the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) has identified ‘black spots’ across the country’s national highways and is working to fix them. He added that MoRTH will received roughly ₹14,000 crore aimed at enabling the apex body to address such spots that are prone to accidents.
A little bit of insight here: Black spot, commonly referred to as an accident blackspot across the globe, is a spot that has a record for a high number of road traffic accidents. There is no one reason as to what makes a specific place unusually prone to accidents, i.e. the reason typically varies. Some times it is because of poor visibility of junctions or perhaps the warning signs at the crossroad are concealed. Anyway, as mentioned above, this is a problem that is caused by various factors, thus necessitating the use of a multi-faceted strategy for our endeavours to fix not just the blackspots on highways, but road safety levels across the country.
Source: Times Now News
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