Srinagar, Jan 23 (KNS): Concerned over the high rate of casualties in frequent road accidents in the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir, the Lieutenant Governor (LG) Girish Chandra Murmu led administration has directed authorities to review cause of recurring fatal accidents and take stern action against the traffic violators.
Sources told KNS that the traffic police have also been directed to increase patrolling on the national highways particularly in the areas of Srinagar Jammu National Highway.
A senior official of the state transport department said that the number of accidents could be reduced only through effective intervention from the police and the regional transport office.
“Road accidents, especially on National Highway, and other roads of Jammu are assuming alarming proportions. There are standard rules and instructions for vehicle drivers about how to drive safe in mountainous regions but unfortunately the vehicle drivers are not following the standard rules for road safeties,” sources while quoting LG having said to the officials.
“The graph of road accidents shows that most of the road accidents happen owing to the fault of the drivers and only few owing to the fault of pedestrians. It means that the transport authorities have to focus on why the drivers are the main cause of accidents and how that situation can be brought under control,” one of the official of the government said.
The Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways had conducted research on the reasons for increasing road accidents in JK and has observed that the lack of education, enforcement, engineering and emergency is the main reasons for the growing accidents.
According to the official figures, around 6,000 road accidents have been reported annually for the last two years in the state. The actual number according to officials would be much higher as lots of such incidents go unreported.
Sources said that in 2015, 917 people lost their lives in 5,800 road accidents. In 2016, 910 lives were claimed and over 8,000 suffered injuries by road accidents in the state especially in the Jammu region. That means three people die on an average daily in the state.
Between 2011 and 2014, 3960 people lost their lives by road accidents and more than 30,000 people were injured in over 20,000 road accidents.
“The number of road accidents in Jammu and Kashmir which claim around one thousand lives per year is double than the national average based on population of the state,” one of the top Traffic police official said.
“Over 60 percent of the total natural deaths had been caused by road accidents in Jammu and Kashmir while the national average is around 30 percent,” he added.
Sources also said that Jammu and Kashmir also topped the list of “high accidental death-prone areas” in a National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB) survey conducted in 2013, which found that an accident in Jammu And Kashmir State has a 64 percent chance of causing death as opposed to 36.4 percent for all of India.