466 accident-prone spots identified on AP highways

New Delhi: Andhra Pradesh has 466 black spots or accident-prone areas in the National Highways, according to the state police.

Disclosing this to the Rajya Sabha, Union minister for highways and transport, Nitin Gadkari, said on Wednesday that the ministry had defined protocol for identification of black spots as a length of 500 metre in which either five road accidents occur in three consecutive calendar years or 10 fatalities.

The question was raised by YSRCP MP V Vijayasai Reddy.

Several measures for mitigation had been prescribed by the Centre for preventing those accidents or fatalities and the state government too had been instructed to do the same.

To another question of Reddy, the minister of state for rural development, Sadhvi Niranjan Jyothi, said coffee plantation was not permissible activity under Mahatma Gandhi National Rural Employment Guarantee Scheme as per the objective of the Act.

Vijayasai sought to know whether the scheme was permissible for Araku and Visakhapatnam coffee plantations.