Rising fatalities undermine govt’s road safety claims

In the latest National Crime Record Bureau (NCRB) report, Punjab not only accounted for the highest number (89) of drug overdose deaths in 2023, the border state also saw 4,906 precious lives being lost in fatal road accidents during the same period.

It, thereby, gained notoriety of being the state with third-most road fatalities in the country, only behind Mizoram and Bihar.

The reasons for the state's road safety crisis go beyond often stated reasons. Punjab's claim of having reduced highway fatalities by 48 per cent after the deployment of the Sadak Surakhya Force (SSF), a special highway safety unit, in 2024 should have come as a shot in the arm of the state agencies.

But this is just half the story. As per the official data released by the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), 326 of the total 480 accident black spots had been eliminated by April 2024. But in evaluation, 354 such black spots had recurred, indicating temporary measures instead of engineering redesign or other permanent measures.

Another discrepancy that has emerged in the NHAI data is the reduction of 42.88 per cent fatalities on rectified black spots, resulting in the overall reduction of 9.33 per cent fatalities on the 13 corridors of the highways in the state. However, the reduction of the fatalities is not reflected in the annual road accident report published by the Punjab Police.

The Punjab authorities have been put on the mat by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) for major discrepancies in the state’s road fatality data uploaded on Detailed Accident Report (e-DAR) system. Without uploading the updated road accident data, discrepancies in analysis of the road accidents data are bound to happen. The e-DAR platform (earlier known as I-RAD) has been developed by MoRTH for reporting, management and analysis of road accident data.

In fact, Punjab has been flagged among the worst-performing states in implementing the e-DAR. Compared to smaller states such as Arunachal Pradesh, Meghalaya, Mizoram, Nagaland and Tripura, Punjab stood out as the worst performer, with a discrepancy of 4,175 fatalities remaining unresolved despite repeated letters and high-level meetings with ministers and senior officials.

In December 2024, MoRTH, in its statement, said since the rollout of the e-platform, Punjab had just uploaded data of only 1,800 accidents, whereas neighbouring states showed accidents as follows: Haryana (30,115), Rajasthan (86,255), Delhi (17,106), Himachal Pradesh (4,902) and Chandigarh (2,996).

Officials with the State Transport Department admit that statistics often fail to reflect the true scale of the problem.

The worst-affected areas are within the civic body limits. A major contributor has been the hit-and-run cases. Official statistics reveal that 46 persons died in Ludhiana and 24 in Amritsar alone in these cases between January 1 and July 15 this year.

While high-profile cases like the death of world’s oldest marathon runner, 114-year-old Fauja Singh and death of Riche KP, son for former MP Mohinder KP, both in Jalandhar, were reported, many cases go unreported.

An analysis of accident data has linked poor driving skills as the leading cause of road crashes in Punjab. The revelations have come months after the Punjab Vigilance, while probing a fake driving licence scam found that agents, in collusion with RTO officials, were reusing old test videos under new applicants’ names, using the same vehicles multiple times and deploying proxy drivers to pass test on behalf of others.

As the state government has launched its “Yudh Nashian Virudh” (fight against drugs), it is high time a similar campaign to make roads safe is launched.