Highways and major roads in Goa have expanded exponentially with new bridges built, roads widened and concretised, and signages put up, cutting down point-to-point intra-State travel times. However, while hundreds of crores of rupees have been spent on this development work, little attention seems to have been paid to road safety, and folks continue to lose lives in mishaps at a rate which is rising alarmingly each passing year. This year is seemingly turning out no different and in the first four months alone, fatalities on roads have dominated the narrative. The Goan dives into the subject, crunches the numbers and elicits views from officials of the relevant departments and experts on the way forward in reversing the trend of rising fatalities in road accidents.
Hundreds of crores of rupees spent on expanding the national and State highways, including building state-of-the-art bridges and flyovers, have come in for much praise and generally positive publicity. Yet, the trend of rising road accidents snuffing out lives, many of them in their prime, refuses to reverse.
Last week on Sunday alone, three youngsters were killed in two separate mishaps in the Mormugao jurisdiction alone. In the first incident, three young lads were riding triple-seat on a scooter in Vasco city and were apparently being chased by a police vehicle. In the hurry to hoodwink the cops, the rider Prakash Bind (30) lost control at a junction and crashed into the rear wheels of a KTC shuttle bus. He died on the spot and the first pillion rider Arun Kumar Saroj (21) breathed his last while on the way to a hospital. His brother, who was the third pillion rider, Ritesh Saroj (29) was grievously injured and is undergoing treatment at the Goa Medical College Bambolim.
In the second incident, on Sunday, MacArthur Pereira (23), of Utorda in Salcete, died after his car crashed head-on with an oncoming mini-truck at a junction of the NH-66. Pereira was travelling from Panaji in the wee hours of dawn and was to take the T-junction road leading to his residence in Utorda when the collision happened. There are no eyewitnesses and preliminary investigations suggest he could have probably dozed off on the wheel.
These fatalities of young men, still in their twenties, have shaken the collective conscience of many Goans and have been the subject of animated discussion and debate across local social media groups.
Rash driving is usually the cause
Human error, usually due to rash driving and negligence, accounts for more than half the number of accidents reported in Goa, according to Director of Transport, Rajan Satardekar.
He says the department has activated an online documentation programme from last year and data available indicates that most are self-accidents.
Statistics of the last one year show that the 6 pm to 9 pm window is the time in the day which accounts for the maximum number of mishaps.
"It is the time when people are leaving work to get back home. Possibly the time when they are mentally and physically tired and want to get home early," Satardekar opines, adding that driving soon after finishing work is inadvisable.
Black spots
Crunching the numbers from the data and attempting to decipher road accident patterns, Satardekar says has helped them to identify some of the prominent black spots and areas where accidents occur the most.
The digitized accident investigation mechanism -- integrated road accident database (i-RAD) -- has been put into use since February last year and the department now has data of the entire map of Goa and will work on remedial measures, he adds.
Enforcement crucial
Traffic management and pulling up violators by issuing challans and levying the prescribed fines is paramount for proper traffic management and disciplining riders/drivers, said Satardekar.
However, with insufficient staff to man the entire network of roads in the State, the department is now increasingly relying on Artificial Intelligence powered tools for surveillance.
It has now been publicly announced that the department will be resorting to remote challaning with the aid of footage from CCTV cameras installed across Goa. It will be implemented from May 15 this year and public notices have already been issued pre-warning the public of the new system and identifying at least a dozen spots in and around the capital city where a 24x7 surveillance of traffic is being carried out.
In the beginning, Panaji, Merces, Taleigao and parts of Porvorim and Betim have been covered with the Electronic Enforcement by the Transport Department, which is statutorily backed by section 136-A of the Motor Vehicles Act 1988.
It has the capacity to detect violations such as overspeeding, red light jumping, lane-cutting, etc, and will certainly help traffic movement in these areas to become safer and more secure.
