The growing concern
Mishaps and more so road mishaps are proving a real cause for concern across the country. Not only in Jammu and Kashmir but elsewhere as well every day we get to hear about loss of lives due to road mishaps.
Perhaps during the past two months the number of road mishaps has seen an increase and almost every region in the country is witnessing loss of lives and property as well due to the road mishaps.
Since Jammu and Kashmir is a hilly region with many areas still falling in remote zones where road accessibility has always been an issue, the reckless and rash driving in most of the urban and semi-urban areas by the youngsters and commercial drivers is also leading to many road mishaps and loss of human lives besides rendering many injured.
Even this year the fatalities in various road mishaps have been too high. Ironically, rash driving and violation of traffic rules are the basic reasons for rising accidents and loss of lives. The rising fatalities in road mishaps were termed as a huge worry by the Lieutenant Governor Manoj Sinha who also chaired a high-level meeting on Road Safety few montsh back.
Though the concerned officials were tasked to identify factors contributing to road accidents and take proactive measures, ensuring enforcement of safety laws in true spirit and making improvements in the response system and spreading awareness on road safety, the issue seems pretty complicated to be resolved by these measures alone.
The administration besides imposing these measures needs to resort to scientific and technology-driven traffic management for highly effective road safety measures. These can include real time monitoring of all the vehicles and ensuring strict GPS tracking so that speed check is put in place on all commercial and passenger vehicles.
Training of traffic police, strengthening manpower, generating awareness amongst the people, especially in educational institutions, crackdown on drunken driving and speed, roping in volunteers for road safety programs also need to be taken up seriously to address the challenges.
These being the primary steps the administration also needs to rope in parents of young adults to aware them about the risks of rash driving which unfortunately most of the youngsters are resorting to.
Secondly, the trauma care too needs to be taken up for improvement and the health department needs to explore possibility of developing more trauma centres near accident-prone highways to help accident victims during the crucial golden hours.
Besides, some traffic officials also need to be trained for replicating the effective traffic management models and collaborative efforts with different stakeholders to get the desired results on the ground.
KV News
