A good many of the road accidents take place in cities. More vehicles on the streets, inadequate and ill-functioning traffic support systems with little demarcation of lanes for different types of vehicles with varying speed capacity, poor condition of the roads, drivers ill-educated in the risks of rash driving, poor signage, and poor enforcement of traffic rules, all play havoc with the lives of individuals.
The Working Group on Road Accidents, Injury Prevention and Control, set up by the Planning Commission in the year 2000, had assessed the social cost of road accidents in India at Rs. 55,000 crores, which constituted about 3% of the Gross Domestic Product of the country in the year 1999-2000.” Further, the world report on road traffic and injury prevention by World Bank and WHO published in 2004, has estimated the cost of road crash injuries at roughly 1% of GNP in low income countries, 1.5% in middle income countries and 2% in high income countries.
Ministry of Road Transport & Highways collects information on road accidents from States/Union Territories (UTs) in a 19-item format devised under Asia Pacific Road Accident Data (APRAD)/ Indian Road Accident Data (IRAD) project for the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Asia and the Pacific and publishes the data in ‘Road Accidents in India’. Based on the latest issue of ‘Road Accident in India’ and issue of the ‘World Road Statistics’ (WRS) 2010 brought out by the International Road Federation, Geneva, the average number of road accidents (defined in terms of road accidents per one lakh population) in select countries is as under:-