While WHO indicates  road accidents as the 10^th largest cause of deaths in the world, India has the highest number of road accident deaths and Chennai (including suburbs) has the second highest recorded number of fatalities in the country after Delhi. The increase in vehicular population coupled with bad road infrastructure and the absence of a strict traffic policy, leads to accidents many of which are fatal in nature.

To deal with rising accidents the state government approved a road safety policy in 2007 at district level commissioning the district collector to promote road safety, prepare road safety plans with special attention to accident prone spots/ stretches, maintenance of road, accident analysis etc.

The traffic police is constantly pressurised to monitor and facilitate the road users besides enforcing the regulation. As the accidents are caused due to carelessness of the motorists; and implementing precautions to ensure road safety costs money the government decided to levy a road safety tax. Before August 2009 the road safety fund was spent from the government’s treasury as there was no stipulated tax or source of revenue to expend on road safety. This is one-time tax collected during the registration of the vehicle by the RTO (Regional Transport Office) and varies from Rs 250 to Rs 2500.  The collection between August 2009-January 2010 amounts to about Rs 28 crore. (T.Ramakrishnan, 2010)

The RTO comes under the office of Transport Commissioner who is also the Road safety commissioner and is responsible to co-ordinate periodically with all the agencies involved in the road safety committee. The Road safety commissioner along with the committee is responsible to allocate funds to different agencies based on the budget that each department sends, in order of priority of functions each needs to devolve.

The enforcement of traffic rests with the traffic police and building and maintenance of road infrastructure in urban areas is dealt by the corporation and the highway department (read our previous blog “Road services and maintenance: under whose purview does it fall?”). It is the Road safety commissioner’s role to bridge the gap between different agencies.

Although the policy note highlights the mechanisms to reduce accidents by 20% in 2013 keeping the base year as 2006, the statistics below shows no signs of change and has remain stagnant for the past two years. The following analysis and statistics are based on the reply of a RTI filed to the Chennai traffic police and has some discrepancies.

Source: Chennai Traffic Police RTI

The table above indicates the categories and the number of accidents from 2006-2009. It shows that though the rate of fatal accidents to the total accidents has reduced, their numbers remain constant.

Source: Chennai Traffic Police RTI

The above statistics shows that although the number of accidents increased in 2008, the number of affected people have remained constant. Amongst the affected parties men account for 80% of all the accidents and the pedestrians and two-wheeler are the most affected of all the parties. The table below indicates reduction of accidents involving cyclists, while accidents involving people travelling in cars and buses have increased. But the most affected are the pedestrians and the people travelling on two wheelers as they together form 60% of the affected parties.

Source: Chennai Traffic Police RTI

The Tamil Nadu state traffic planning cell reports that around every third person who dies due to a road accident is a pedestrian. It can be argued that the accidents involving pedestrians is caused due to lack of appropriate pedestrian infrastructure and the government is spending very little money in ensuring safety of the pedestrian. The budget allocated for pavements in the 2010-11 budgets of the corporation of Chennai was Rs.45 lakh, where all the zones except zone X have been allocated Rs. 5 lakh each.
Is this fund sufficient for building enough pedestrian infrastructures to ensure their safety? Don’t the prevailing conditions demand a policy, or a bill to ensure adequate allocation of pedestrian facilities and define the rights of the pedestrian on the road?

Roshan Toshniwal

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