NEW DELHI: Senior cabinet minister Gopinath Munde's death in a car crash in the capital brought into sharp focus once again the alarming number of fatalities on Indian roads with little thought on safety.
Senior cabinet minister Gopinath Munde's death in a car crash in the capital Tuesday brought into sharp focus once again the alarming number of fatalities on Indian roads with little thought on safety.
To put this disquieting data in perspective, almost half the equivalent population of some countries like Iceland or the Maldives is wiped out on Indian roads every year.
As per the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), under the Ministry of Home Affairs, as many as many as 461 people died and 1,301 more were injured "every day" from traffic accidents in the country during 2012.
This makes it 19 deaths every hour or more than one death every three minutes.
Kamajit Soi, an international expert on road safety and vice chair of Punjab Road Safety Council, has incidentally written a letter to union Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, seeking immediate steps to end what he terms as "massacre" on Indian roads.
"Over 1.2 million innocent people died on the roads in the last 10 years of the United Progressive Alliance government. The last government did nothing to save lives," Soi, an advisor on road safety to the Asian Development Bank, told IANS.
