Delhi Leads as the Hub of Road Accidents While K'taka Tops in Injuries

Image Courtesy: TOI

BENGALURU: When has any edition of the newspaper last come out without accident news? Stories of drink and drive, hit and run, speeding and overloading keep happening not once or twice but on an annual basis.

As the nation’s road and transport ministry completes filing the Road Accident Report for 2014, it comes out that 75,000 of people aged between 15-34 years led their lives in road accidents last year. 82pct of them were male by gender as reported by ToI.

The report says, "The detailed age profile of road accident victims for calendar year 2014 reveals that the age group of 15-34 years accounted for 53.8pct of the total road accident fatalities, followed by the age group of 35-64 years accounting for a share of (35.7pct)."

A latest report by the World Health Organisation (WHO) also derived that road traffic death is the major reason for death among young people aged between 15-29years. The WHO report gives a count of 3.4lacs youngsters who die in road accidents annually.

Road safety expert Rohit Baluja comments, "This shows that there is a need to pay attention to making young people more aware of road safety issues. Families should play a big role in sensitizing them on how to behave safe on roads. It's a mammoth loss and calculating the social cost would reveal how big it is.”

PM Modi too made a nationwide appeal aimed for the elders of the families through a recent radio announcement called ‘Mann Ki Baat’.

According to TRW, accident rates and road crashes has gone up from 4.86 lakh to 4.89 lakh between 2013-14. 

The report from the road and transport ministry also stated 12pct of the fatalities occur in cities with more than a million population. Delhi leads this list with 1,671 deaths and Chennai at second highest with 1118.

Ludhiana, Dhanbad, Amritsar, Varanasi, Kanpur and Patna are cities where chances of getting killed in a road crash are much higher compared to the rest of the country. Records claim, last year, 318 died in 475 crashes in Ludhiana and for Dhanbad, 63 died out of 106 accidents. For Amritsar, the registered count is 94 fatalities out of 165 crashes.

A TRW official shared his view, "We have been visiting the states reporting maximum deaths and they have become more sensitive towards making roads safe. States are establishing lead agencies for road safety issues as a whole."

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