Steps taken by the Government to prevent Road Accidents

Steps taken by the Government to prevent Road Accidents

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has taken a number of steps to prevent road accidents and road accident fatalities.

These include:-

A multi – pronged strategy has been adopted based on four Es – Engineering, Enforcement, Education and Emergency care for ensuring road safety. They are meant to provide better and safer road engineering, improved vehicular safety standards, training of drivers, improved trauma care and creating public awareness.

Improving Vehicular Safety Standards - Trucks are prohibited from carrying protruding rods. Anti – locking Brake System (ABS) has been made mandatory on heavy vehicles. Induction of ABS/CBS for two wheelers are made mandatory. AHO (Automatic Headlight On) made mandatory for two-wheelers to make them more conspicuous.

Pilot Projects for Cashless Treatment of Road Accident Victims - This project has already done in the stretch of NH 8 and NH 33. Now it is proposed to implement this scheme along the Golden Quadrilateral, North South and East West Corridors.

Quick response ambulances are parked in every 50 kms on the National Highways by the National Highway Authority of India (NHAI). 24 x 7 call centre to receive calls for ambulances has been created and training has been given for providing first aid to road safety volunteers.

Setu Bharatam - a program was launched in 2016 for building bridges for safe and seamless travel on National Highways. It aims to make all National Highways free of railway level crossing by 2019.

Speed Governors – This device has a series of sensors that can detect how fast a vehicle is going and if this crosses the limit set by it, it restricts the flow of air and fuel to the engine. This automatically slows down and stops the vehicle from crossing the pre-determined speed.

Variable Message Signs – These are LED boards which can display im portant information that needs to be communicated to commuters. These can be used to update road users the traffic conditions in case of major breakdowns, congestions and so on.

Brasilia Declaration on Road Safety

It is the Second Global High level Conference on Road Safety co–sponsored by the WHO. Taking road safety as a serious issue, India signed Brasilia Declaration in 2015 through which the participants across the world are committed to improve road safety and ways to reduce the traffic deaths by the end of this decade.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has released a set of comic books on road safety called Swachha Safer and Suvarshit Yatra with the aim of creating awareness among children.

Save LIFE Foundation is an independent, non-profit, non-governmental and public charitable trust that is working to improve road safety and emergency medical care across India.