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| No end to end on roads | | | | Ending life on the roads, unsuspectingly, has just become order of the day in Jammu region. Another bus accident, another batch of killings, may be another inquiry and then several other buses take the same route to death. Road accidents have become an order of the day in Jammu and Kashmir and more particularly in regions of Doda, Kishtwar, Ramban, Rajouri and Poonch. The Kishtwar mishap which took some dozen lives on Thursday and as many are still feared dead is nothing new on our roads. Road accidents have always been, still continue and will remain a major challenge to the life in Jammu and Kashmir. For the challenges like militancy and cross border terrorism there is a well organized focus at different levels. Road accidents have been proving more lethal in this state than the challenge of militancy. Look at the recent incident of terror in Chinore area of Jammu which took away 12 lives. Not only the government and security agencies but entire nation was hooked on the operation that continued for 19 hours. Even ten days later, there are commentaries and analysis on what led to happenings in Chinore and how such incidents can be avoided in future. There is hardly anyone to throw light on the incident which happened on Kishtwar road the previous day. In both incident, the ultimate toll is of the human life. Still militancy gets attention for combat for the reason that this challenge is associated with politics which no one would like to risk. If we look at the daily statistics, two to three people are being killed in the minor road accidents almost everyday across the state. The only difference is that the minor ones go unnoticed and only the major mishap grabs public attention. India stands among ten top countries in Asia for the notoriety of its road accidents. And in India, Jammu and Kashmir is the second most accident prone state after Himachal Pradesh. There are other hilly states also like Uttaranchal but still J&K is ahead of others. The reason is lack of will. After every accident, the state government orders a customary inquiry to look into the reasons and in some cases compensation is offered to the families of victims. The next day things move on. A promising measure was taken by the Ghulam Nabi Azad government earlier this year but this could not materialize till fall of his government. A panel of experts had suggested widening of curves on roads in Doda-Kishtwar region and making it mandatory that only the vehicles of a limited length ply on these roads. The government had claimed that these measures would be put in place within next two months. Yet another accident on same road again suggests that when it comes to road accidents the proposals often dry their inks on the files. This is high time that the Governor’s administration looked into network of death on the roads and devised some measures for minimizing the human loss. The sooner, the better. |
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