WHO road safety campaign 2011: World unites to halt death and injury on the road It is high time for us to look into the various issues of the RTA in this perspective so that corrective and preventive measures can be undertaken in an urgent manner so that further damages can be lessened. Realizing this serious Public Health Issue happening globally, the WHO in 2004 came out with a theme of “Road Safety is No Accidents” to highlight the urgency to tackle the issue on a priority basis.
Furthermore, accidents related to driver's hypo-vigilance are more serious than other types of accidents, since sleepy drivers often do not take correct action prior to a collision. Statistics show that 20% of all the traffic accidents and up to one-quarter of fatal and serious accidents are due to drivers with a diminished vigilance level. The increasing number of traffic accidents due to a diminished driver's vigilance level has become a serious problem for society. Drunken driving has been responsible for 70% of road fatalities in Mumbai and Delhi.ĭriver fatigue is a very dangerous condition created when a person is suffering symptoms of fatigue while driving, often resulting from the hypnotic effect especially during nighttime driving either falling asleep at the wheel or so exhausted to make serious- and fatal-driving errors. In Bangalore, 28% of crashes involving males over 15 years were attributable to alcohol.
India has laws to check the drunken driving but its effective implementation is still to be worked upon. Small bars along the Indian highways are of prime concern to control drunken driving. Private car owners and youngsters are also major players in the game. In India, drunken driving is customary in commercial vehicle drivers. In contrast, studies in low- and middle-income countries like India have shown that between 33% and 69% of fatally injured drivers and between 8% and 29% of nonfatally injured drivers had consumed alcohol before their crash. In most high-income countries about 20% of fatally injured drivers have excess alcohol in their blood, i.e., blood alcohol concentration (BAC) in excess of the legal limit.
Globally, some 480,000 deaths and 20 million of people get injured by drunken driving every year. The statistics also show that most of the road accidents in the highways are due to drunken driving only. The trend is alarming and is leading to a frightening situation day by day.ĭrunken driving is one of the major causes of road accidents. Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Maharashtra, Karnataka, and Rajasthan have accounted for 11.5%, 10.5%, 7.1%, and 6.8%, respectively, of total “Road Accident” deaths in the country. Deaths due to road accidents in 2009 were reported to be 126,896 and in 2010 it increased to 133,938 which is about 5.5% over and above the previous year's deaths. The data for fatal accidents presented to the Parliament by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways for year 2008 shows that 119,860 people perished in mishaps that year and the national and state highways accounted for nearly half of all road accidents. The highest burden of injuries and fatalities is borne disproportionately by poor people, as they are mostly pedestrians, cyclists, and passengers of buses and minibuses. Those who are affected or killed are mostly people in their prime productive age. Often members of the whole family are wiped out. Not a day passes without RTA happening in the roads in India in which countless number of people are killed or disabled.
Injury and deaths due to road traffic accidents (RTA) are a major public health problem in developing countries where more than 85% of all deaths and 90% of disability-adjusted life years were lost from road traffic injuries.Īs a developing country, India is no exception. Although the number of lives lost in road accidents in high-income countries indicate a downward trend in recent decades, for most of the world's population, the burden of road-traffic injury-in terms of societal and economic costs-is rising substantially. Motorization has enhanced the lives of many individuals and societies, but the benefits have come with a price.