Rear-End Collisions Responsible For 40% Road Accident Deaths; Sleep Is #1 Reason For Accidents

Road accidents are not a new thing for us. They keep on happening all over the world every day. They also take a lot of lives every day. So it becomes imperative that we try to understand the proper reason behind these road accidents and try to nullify them.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways had given the exact job of auditing corridors to an NGO called SaveLife Foundation. The report by this foundation contains some startling facts.

Rear-end collisions cause around 40% of fatal accidents

As per the audit report published by the SaveLife foundation, rear-end collisions account for around 40 percent of fatal accidents on highway stretches. Driver “sleepiness and fatigue” is being zeroed in as the main reason behind these crashes.

The study consisted of an audit of four highway stretches in Uttar Pradesh and Maharashtra totaling 557 km one way. The four audited stretches had witnessed over 6,500 accidents over the past three years, of which over 1,600 were serious and fatal ones.

Apart from usual deficiencies such as drink driving the report also noted down reasons such as riding without helmets, lack of proper illumination in some stretches, lack of enforcement by state governments, etc. At the same time, local factors related to the weather have also contributed to accidents.

The SaveLife foundation also found that several engineering defects such as gaps in medians, missing crash barriers, concrete structures kept along the road, etc, as reasons for accidents and fatalities.  For example, in the Agra-Etawah stretch, 7,500 such engineering faults were identified. The other three corridors that were audited are Etawah-Chakeri in UP, and Pune-Satara and Satara-Kagal in Maharashtra.

12 more stretches will be audited

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways has set aside 12 more stretches totaling around 4,000 km across 15 states to be audited by SaveLife Foundation. These stretches contribute to 85 percent of all accidents and fatalities in a year on Indian roads.

NGO had carried out a similar audit on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway. When recommendations by the NGO were implemented, fatalities reduced by 52 percent between 2016 and 2020.

In the context of India is notoriously infamous for  5 lakh road accidents and 1.5 lakh deaths from them every year, these actions taken by The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways are most welcome for safety on Indian roads.