On March 16, 2020, Minister of Road Transport & Highways and Minister of Micro, Small and Medium Enterprises Nitin Gadkari revealed that the number of deaths caused due to road accidents has been reduced by 10% in India after the Motor Vehicles(Amended) Act 2019.
Key Points:
i.From 12 states and union territories, Tamil Nadu made notable progress in reducing road accidents by 24% which is the maximum anywhere in the country.
ii.Jammu and Kashmir and Chandigarh showed 15% reduction, Gujarat- 14%,Uttar Pradesh 13%, Andhra Pradesh 7%, Manipur- 4% in the number of deaths due to accidents.
Kerala & Assam showed a rise of 4.9% & 8% in deaths due to road accidents.
iii.Government pledged to reduce 50% accidents in the next 5 years & India signed an agreement to this at the World Safety Conference held in Sweden on 19–20 February 2020.
iv.Within the next 1 month to ensure flawless traffic FASTag, electronic toll collection will handle 98% of transactions currently it handles 73%.
Steps taken to reduce accidents
- Government proposed to open 1,000 driving schools of which 22 have already been opened.
- 3000 black spots identified to reduce accidents as most accidents occur due to poor road engineering
- In a Rs 14,000 crore project World Bank & the Asian Development Bank invested Rs 7000 crore & the same amount to be spent by the Government towards education, enforcement & to improve road engineering to help to reduce accidents.
About mv act:
The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 was enacted in 1988 by the parliament of India.The amendments in the Bill focuses mainly on issues relating to improving road safety. Following are among major changes, Fine for Drunken drive- Rs 10000 from Rs 2000;Driving without seatbelt- Rs 1,000 from Rs 100;Cab aggregators for violation of license rules- UptoRs 1 lakh;Speeding or racing- Rs 5000;Overloading of 2 wheelers- Rs 20000 from Rs 1000 & disqualification of driving license for 3 months.
