Kolkata emerged as the country’s best performing metropolitan city in 2022 in cutting down fatalities from road accidents, experts revealed on the sidelines of the release of a road safety-related policy document on Tuesday.
The document also showed that West Bengal had slipped marginally in checking both road accidents and fatalities since chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced the ‘Safe drive, save live’ campaign in 2016, one of her pet initiatives.
West Bengal transport minister Snehasis Chakraborty released the document — Speed management for enhancing road safety in West Bengal: policy interventions and roadmap — prepared jointly by the transport department and the Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, on Tuesday in the presence of state transport secretary Saumitra Mohan, senior officials of state and Union government departments and professor Bhargab Maitra of IIT-KGP; who led the study.
“We are already doing well but we would like to do even better and hence, we have prepared this policy document taking help of IIT-KGP, a first-of-its-kind in the country,” claimed the minister.
“The state is doing quite well but we do not want a single fatality to happen on the roads. The data shows that overspeeding is the main cause for the fatalities. Hence, we, along with the state government, have prepared this policy,” said Maitra.
Transport secretary Mohan recognised that implementation of the policy would be the real challenge but expected to push it through with involvement of all stakeholders, many of whom were present in the meeting.
Delhi first in fatalities, Kolkata 38th among 50 cities
Sourced from the Union ministry of road transport and highways, Maitra shared data showing that in 2022, Kolkata was the 13th best ranking in the entire country and best among metropolitan cities.
Delhi was the poorest performing city in road fatalities within the country in 2022 with 1,461 deaths being followed by Bengaluru with 772 deaths. Chennai occupied the 10th worst ranking with 507 deaths, while Mumbai claimed the 14th worst ranking with 371 deaths.
Incidentally, Kolkata has halved both the number of accidents and fatalities since chief minister Mamata Banerjee announced the ‘Safe drive, save live’ programme in 2016, with the number of road accidents reducing from 4,104 to 1,948, and fatalities going down from 407 to 185 in 2022.
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Bengal, however, has overall slipped since the flagship road safety programme was announced.
The document shows that the state has consistently had around 12,000 road crashes every year and actually, recorded the highest in 2022 – 13,686 – since 2016, when the figure stood at 13,580. Similarly, annual fatalities too increased in the last seven years; 5,711 in 2016 to 6,002 in 2022.
“Rest of Bengal neither has the manpower nor the infrastructure support that Kolkata has, and that shows in the results,” admitted a senior government official.
The report shows that almost half of accidents involved pedestrians but minister Snehasish Chakraborty refused to single out drivers for the trend.
“The fault of drivers may be only one of the reasons but there can be several other reasons linked to the accident and hence, I do not want to penalise the driver blanketly once an accident happens,” said the minister in the meeting.
Later, he told The Plurals on the sidelines that the state has decided not to toe the new and stringent hit-and-run law being proposed by the Union government for the drivers linked to accidents.
Under the new law, Bharatiya Nyay Sanhita (BNS), drivers are slated to face 10 years of imprisonment and fine of Rs 7 lakh; which has been only two years of imprisonment under the IPC Act.