Telangana needs to do much on road safety front

Hyderabad: Expressing serious concern over the deaths of 6,690 people in road accidents till date in Telangana, the Chairman of Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety (CoRS), Abhay Manohar Sapre, on Saturday called for significant improvement in road safety measures.

The CoRS Chairman convened a meeting on 'Road Safety' in the city on Saturday to review the road safety interventions taken up by the State government. The officials gave a Powerpoint presentation to the Chairman. Though accidents are more in countries like China, Japan and Germany, the fatalities are only a few thousands, whereas in India around 1.5 lakh people are losing lives every year, he noted. The recent audit conducted by the CoRS stressed that the road safety situation in Telangana needed improvement.

Sapre informed that in Telangana 91 per cent fatalities were road-related due to over speeding. He called upon the government to control over speeding. The officials informed that the government had decided to allocate Rs 25 crore towards a non-lapsable road safety fund. The GHMC took up a Comprehensive Road Maintenance Programme with Rs 1,839 crore. The transport department suspended 10,728 driving licences this year, which include 6,298 cancellations due to drunken driving.