The road transport and highways ministrywhich publishes the data on road crashes, fatalities and injuries annually after collating them from all states and UTs is yet to make it public.Sources said the jump in road fatalities is a cause of concern considering that India has also set the target to halve the deaths by 2030.
A comparison of the data shows that in 2022, the country saw a jump of nearly 9% in terms of fatalities as compared to 2021 and an increase of around 11.5% more than the deaths in the pre-pandemic year of 2019. “Losing one life every three minutes is a big concern. In the past few years we have built or expanded wider roads and we have more high speeding vehicles. But such a high number of fatalities is unacceptable,” a source said.
While all these years, the focus of public discourse and policy attention has been on the fatalities in road crashes, the increasing number of people left injured is also emerging as a major cause of concern. In 2022, the number of persons injured in crashes stood at 4.43 lakh compared to 3.84 lakh in 2021, a jump of nearly 15%.
“We will be able to curb the number of road deaths and injuries only when we have proper diagnosis of the problem, fix accountability of people and entities who are responsible for different tasks. That’s how countries in Europe have been successful in bringing down the fatalities,” said Rohit Baluja, a road safety expert and member at the UN Road Safety Collaboration.