Soon, India won’t have world’s highest number of road accidents as Rs 2,000 crore are being pumped in to make roads safer

India wants to do away with the sobriquet of world’s deadliest roads and the road and transport ministry is going to launch a scheme for safer roads in this regard.

The Pradhan Mantri Surakshit Sadak Yojana will be launched soon with an initial funding of Rs 2,000 crore. The funds will be used to make Indian roads accident-free and also weed out dangerous spots on highways.

To eliminate deadly road accidents, better designs will be made to install railings on hill roads, running along deep gorges.

The details have been sought from hill states and the Indian government will rope in Indian Institutes of Technology to prepare special reflectors to fix them on sharp curves.

"The scheme has already been approved by the road transport minister and the corpus would be created from the available central road fund. States have already been asked to send details of locations where regular accidents occur. As per our information, there are around 796 such spots across the country," a senior government official told ET.

As per WHO, India has the highest number of roads fatalities in the world and over 231,000 people are killed in road traffic crashes in the country every year.

India wants to half the number of road accident deaths by 2020.

The road ministry also wants to make vehicles safe and will set up an agency-the Bharat National Car Assessment Programme-to grade the safety of cars sold in India.

According to the proposed norms, all scooters and motorcycles in India will have automatic headlamps on, similar to daytime running lamps in cars.

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