To reduce road fatalities
- Hueiyen Lanpao Editorial :: September 16, 2014 -

Even though we do not have the latest report or data, still we can assure that anyone could safely assume that the number of road related accidents and fatalities has been on the rise in Manipur.

Not a day passes by without any report of road mishaps or someone killed in a road related accident, and there are some very obvious reasons for that.

While the number of vehicles of different types plying on the roads has been ever increasing year after year, the condition of most roads in Manipur, whether it be National Highways, State Highways, Inter or Intra-district, IVRs or the roads in the capital city itself, have remained more or less the same down the years: Pathetic, to say the least.

In such a situation, there is the urgent need for road safety measures to reduce road accidents and make the road safer in Manipur.

To start off, one may argue that proper development of roads is a must to reduce road fatalities and engineers and other officials concerned should keep in mind the types of vehicles available in the market while planning for development of roads and proper study should be done prior to the construction or widening of the roads, as improper roads could cause fatal road accidents.

However, there are also other things that we need to take care of if we want the roads in Manipur to be safer for everyone.

Apart from the need to develop the roads properly to prevent road accidents and its related fatalities, another very important factor that contributes to the rising graph of road accidents in Manipur today is the quality of the drivers behind the wheels and the nightmare they caused to the personnel manning the traffic on the roads as well as to the commuters.

Regardless of whether they are young or old, it has been seen that once they hit the roads, most drivers have scant regard for following the traffic norms and regulations and they all seem to be in a race to take over one another.

This utter lack of traffic sense stems from the very fact that many of the drivers in Manipur have not undergone the required driving lesson from some driving school or face the required driving test supposed to be conducted by the Transport Department before issuing the driving license to them.

The failure on the part of the Department concerned do to its job can be easily known from the number of young students in school uniforms driving vehicles on the roads.

Manipur may be the only place where one could see such spectacle of under-age kids driving engined-vehicles on the roads so freely, with no one to stop them - neither their parents nor the officials manning the traffic.

But how these school-going kids get their driving license?

Perhaps, there is an urgent need to sensitize the officials and staffs of the Transport Department responsible for issuing driving license for reducing road fatalities in Manipur.