There will perhaps be little controversy in admitting that awareness levels of our Indian population on various issues that are very much intertwined in our social fabric are below average. Ditto when we talk about road safety.

And over the years we have devised certain instruments to address these topics by enhancing and upgrading our janta’s level of understanding and knowledge.  Road Safety Week is one such.It is a national level annual event aimed at raising public awareness about traffic rules and ultimately reducing casualties due to road accidents. 

National Road Safety Week in India is organised by the National Safety Council of India (NSC), an autonomous body set up by the Indian government to engage the public on safety, health and environment issues. The country’s Ministry of Road Transport & Highways plays a major role here .It encourages our state governments to take the lead on Road Safety Week initiatives and provides a list of suggested activities to promote road safety in their region ,besides allocating a budget to meet the financial expenses in this regard.

This year, the 30th edition’s theme for the campaign is “Sadak Suraksha – Jeevan Raksha” and Arunachal Pradesh will also be observing it throughout the state till Feb 10 with Capital superintendent of police kicking off the event on Monday at Dera Natung Government College.

A little bit of statistics will help us in realising the gravity of the situation and relevance of Road Safety Weeks. In 2017, a total of 4,64,910 road accidents were reported in the country, claiming 1,47,913 lives ( this is perhaps double of our current Itanagar population !). Thus our deadly Indian roads claimed 17 lives every hour in 2017, when acts of terrorism claimed less than 300 lives which is less than one a day in the entire year, raising a pertinent question- What causes more loss of lives in our country – terror attacks or road accidents? And for every Indian killed in a road accident, three more suffered various degrees of injuries. Well these are officially reported accidents with police cases lodged . It can thus be logically inferred that there must be a substantial number that go unreported across the length and breadth of the nation.

If signing of the Brasilia declaration way back in 2015, committing to reduce the volume of road accidental fatalities to half by 2020 is a signal of our seriousness in global context, the domestic figures and trends over the years corroborates little and we are way behind to reach this target. 

If vehicle density – which means the number of vehicles per kilometre of road length which has increased alarmingly over the years can be attributed as an infrastructural problem , how about this figure. In 2017, 48,746 road users on two-wheelers lost their lives to road accidents and constitute the single largest road user category in the number of road accident deaths. Out of this, 73.8% i.e three out of four did not wear helmets. If seat belts are mandatory for the driver and the person seated in the front seat in vehicles other than two-wheelers and three-wheelers, a total of 26,896 persons killed in road accidents did not use seatbelts in this particular year itself. Isn’t that we are becoming ‘prisoners of our own device’? 

Here comes the efficacy of the road safety weeks , particularly in our state ,the perennial sufferer when it comes to poor road infrastructure. 30 precious lives were lost due to road accidents last year with injury victims manifold . Our roads are awful and so we should never resort to over-speeding, we should always wear helmets and put on our seat belts …. the mantras will be echoing all over the week. Hopefully we emboss them within ourselves to see the consciousness permeates all throughout the remaining fifty one weeks.

Just as reading an accident report accompanied with a macabre picture is painful , equally distressing it is in writing such reports.