1,51,997 road accidents on National Highways in 2022: Nitin Gadkari to LS

Nitin Gadkari said before the completion certificate is issued, a safety audit is carried out to ascertain the safety requirements

NEW DELHI: The number of road accidents on national highways has risen from 1,44,221 in 2018 to 1,51,997 in 2022, Union minister of road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari told the Lok Sabha on Thursday.

Gadkari said the government annually publishes ‘Road Accidents in India’ based on data received from police departments of states/ UTs (Sansad TV/ANI)

Gadkari, who was responding to an unstarred question from Congress MP Kuldeep Indora, presented data that indicated the number of road accidents on national highways, including expressways, dipped to 1,19,615 and 1,28,825 in 2020 and 2021 respectively, the two years when there were restrictions on movement of people due to the Covid-19 pandemic, before rising in 2022.

To Indora’s question whether the government proposed to form a separate safety authority to maintain standards and coordinate between the state and central governments on highways, the minister said the Indian Roads Congress (IRC) was already mandated to formulate standards, guidelines, and manuals for all highway building and maintenance aspects, including road safety.

Before the completion certificate is issued, a safety audit is carried out to ascertain the safety requirements. In the contracts, he said there are adequate provisions to address the lapses by either the contractor/ concessionaire or authority’s engineer or independent engineer.

In response to another question from Maharashtra’s Dhairyashil Mohan Patil, Gadkari told the Rajya Sabha in a written response on Wednesday that there was no proposal to review speed limits on expressways. The MP had also asked if the government had commissioned an analysis to study the link between speed limits on expressways and road accidents.

“No such specific study examining how expressway speed limits affect road safety and accident rates has been carried out by Government,” the minister said. Gadkari said the government did implement an electronic detailed accident report system, a central repository for recording, management and analysis of road accidents.

He said data entered by the state authorities in respect of Ahmedabad Vadodara Expressway, Eastern Peripheral Expressway, Delhi-Meerut Expressway and Delhi–Mumbai Expressway indicated that there 248 accidents in 2022, 241 accidents in 2023 and 187 accidents in 2024 (till November 22).

“As per the reasons recorded on the eDAR portal for road accidents by the State Authorities, the reasons for accidents are multi causal and Traffic rules violation is the major cause of accidents,” he said.