In a strong step, which was much needed in India, Govt. of India has mandated that all public transport vehicles will be mandated to have GPS or Global Positioning System and panic button.
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways or MORTH made this declaration via Tweet.
Their Twitter handle stated:
Three-wheeler public transport such as auto-rickshaws and electric vehicles have been exempted from this rule as of now.
A senior official from the Ministry has made it clear that there won’t be any extension in this order, and starting April 1st, traffic police would spare no public transport vehicle, if they are not following the mandated rules.
This is the second big GPS related news in this year. Earlier this month, Indian Railways had announced that every train will be powered with GPS devices as manual signalling systems will be abolished.
Why This Step Was Important?
While panic button will help to safeguard the interests of passengers in the vehicle, especially female passengers, GPS will help the commercial vehicle owners to track and monitor the vehicles, and report any untoward incident without any delay.
GPS, when powered with seat belt alert can quickly alert the monitoring team and enforce the passengers and drivers to put on seat belts.
As per a study, 43 out of 100 accident deaths in India takes place due to the victims not wearing helmets and seatbelts. Such is the condition that transport minister Nitin Gadkari had said this is an ‘emergency’ situation.
Another positive change which GPS can bring is reduction is speed and accidents.
When GPS is installed, the monitoring team can track the speed of the vehicle, and order the driver to slow down; this will check their break-neck speed which is often the case with public transport vehicles in India, specially bus drivers.
And, in case an accident happens, GPS tracking can correctly figure out whose fault it was – The hard braking and other signals can be easily tracked via GPS device to find out the real reason behind the accident.
Panic button is, of course, one of the important steps to safeguard female passengers in the public transport.
We hope that Govt. is able to enforce this rule, and make public transport even more safe and secured for all.