Uttar Pradesh Chief Minister Yogi Adityanath has announced a statewide road safety campaign from January 5 to February 4.
In a high-level meeting held on Tuesday, Yogi Adityanath directed officials to make efforts on mission mode to ensure road safety. He said the state was witnessing severe cold and dense fog in the past few days which has increased road accidents during.
“Untimely death of someone in a road accident is very sad. To minimise this, we need to work unitedly focusing on “5E i.e. Education, Enforcement, Engineering, Emergency Care and Environment,” he added.
The CM pointed out that more than 21,200 people have died in road accidents in the last one year in the state, while 23,600 people died during the last three and a quarter years of global pandemic the novel coronavirus. The situation, he said was worrying.
He said road safety is not the responsibility of only one department. This will be possible only through collective efforts. Therefore, it is necessary to run a massive campaign with inter-departmental coordination to prevent road accidents. State-wide road safety campaign should be launched from January 5 for a month.
CM said apart from poor road engineering, overspeeding, overloading, non-use of safety devices and drunken driving are the major factors of road accidents. Most road accidents happen in big cities like Kanpur Nagar, Agra, Prayagraj, Aligarh, Bulandshahr, Mathura. Efforts should be made to reduce road accidents by concentrating on cities that are connected with expressways or national highways. Task force should be constituted to stop overloading.
As per the record in the past one year about 40% of the accidents occurred on National Highways, while 30 per cent took place on state highways. In this situation, patrolling should be increased on expressways, state highways and national highways. In case of an accident, the accident vehicle should be immediately removed from the road. For this, there is a need to increase the number of cranes, he said.