By: PramodKumar
India needs to invest an estimated $109 billion more in road safety over the next decade to halve its crash fatalities, a World Bank report said.
The bank said such an investment will bring economic benefits equivalent annually to 3.7 per cent of the GDP.
The report titled “Delivering Road Safety in India” was released at the ‘Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety’ in Stockholm.
It points to the high death rate on India’s roads caused by chronic lack of investment in systemic, targeted, and sustained road safety programmes and identifies relevant investment priorities to reverse the trend.
India has one of the highest rates of road crashes in the world. Every year, about 150,000 people lose their lives on India’s roads, and more than five times that number are injured or maimed for life, the report said.
The national highways alone claim one life a year for every two kilometers. This is ten times higher than the developed country threshold.
Road crashes also impact economic growth, costing the economy between 3 to 5 per cent of GDP a year, it said.
The report termed India’s recent enactment of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 as an important step towards reducing road crash fatalities.
Crash data collected in a sample of highway sections across Nepal, India, and Bangladesh reveal alarming annual fatality rates ranging from 0.3 to 3 deaths per kilometer, at a yearly average of 0.87 fatalities per kilometer.
“In India, 34.5 per cent of fatalities in 2016 resulted from crashes on the National Highways, which comprise only 1.79 per cent of the country’s total road network,” the report said.
“Historically, when countries reached motorisation levels of between 50–100 vehicles per 1,000 people, road crashes became one of the leading causes of death and injuries. Improving road safety was then recognised as a national development priority,” said Arnab Bandyopadhyay, Lead Transport Specialist, World Bank.
