Ensuring road safety should be top priority

Two major highway accidents in a span of four days in Telangana, which killed 13 in one and seven in another, should call for a serious safety audit of the highways running through the State.

The accidents were as bizarre as they were spine-chilling and both occurred because of over-speeding for which the government does not seem to have any answer.

Take the case of the ghastly mishap at Manakonduru near Karimnagar on Warangal-Karimnagar four-lane road on Tuesday. Seven innocent passengers, who were about to reach Karimnagar, died a horrific death.

The accident took place when a truck charging down the road from opposite direction, while overtaking another vehicle, rammed the RTC bus that was on its way to Karimnagar from Warangal.

Those sitting in the rear of the bus on the right side bore the brunt of the impact, and turned into mincemeat in a split-second as the truck sliced through the bus longitudinally killing them. The truck after hitting the bus swerved and shot towards a road side restaurant but fortuitously came to a halt a jut few yards short of its entrance.

The accident that took place at Rimmanaguda near Gajwel in erstwhile Medak district, on Rajiv Rahadari on last Saturday killing 13 people, was most bizarre in recent memory. An RTC bus tried to overtake a truck from its left side, which is not prohibited and hit a truck at terrific speed.

The truck, on impact, swerved, hit the median, and crashed into the other land, hitting a container truck and then crashed into an SVU which has been packed with 18 people, including women and children.

Four passengers in the bus and eight in SVU died on the spot and while another injured person succumbed subsequently. Some are still undergoing treatment and some of them critical and some are likely to have permanent disability.

The authorities pride themselves that the rate of road accidents in the State had come down by two percent in 2017 compared to 2016. The road safety authorities claim that the number of persons killed came down by nine percent in 2017 compared to 2016.

The figures mean nothing when you look at the accidents, the gory end to the lives of the unsuspecting people and the way the government fails in controlling them.

The main reasons for any accident is over-speeding, which happens in most cases due to the driver being in a state of intoxication, though one cannot say in call cases of over-speeding, the driver is drunk.

Then there are problems in regard to the roads as such. In the case of Rajiv Rahadari, no effort seemed to have been made though a DPR has been submitted to the government on blind spots in the 248kms long four-lane road that had been widened by investing up to Rs.1,200 crore connecting Hyderabad with Ramagundam.

There have been allegations that the road had not been widened into a four-lane road and that at several villages there have to be either by pass-roads or flyovers since it is high speed highway and if they run through a village there is risk to the people living there. The officials estimated that that if the government was ready to spend Rs.1,000 crore the blind spots on the road could be addressed, providing safety to the people.

As far as the Warangal-Karimnagar road is concerned, a proposal for widening the road into a four-lane one is gathering dust in government files. With Mission Bagiratha pipelines running parallel to the road, expansion would mean their removal and this apparently led to the proposal being kept on the back-burner.

Though attending to the blind spots and modernising the highways are a priority, travel on roads should be made safe. If investing huge sums of money in building underpasses, by-pass roads or flyovers is a difficult proposition, the government could at least attend to issues that do not require any monetary investment.

For instance, drunken driving on highways, which is verboten, often is the case particularly when it comes to truck drivers, who are the usual suspects whenever there is a major accident. Though there are laws prohibiting it, lack of will on the part of the government in enforcing it, is leading to the tipplers driving vehicles, imperilling the lives of pedestrians or those moving in vehicles.

This apart, there should be a mechanism to ensure that over-speeding is curbed sooner the better. If the cases are made water-tight, errant drivers cannot go scot-free within the ambit of the existing laws, which could act as a deterrent. Then the enforcement authorities should ensure that the there is no need for trucker to over speed as no harm would befall if the truck reaches the destination a few hours late.

The two recent accidents should serve as wakeup calls to prevent them from being soaked in the blood of innocent people.