Deaths due to coronavirus have almost come to a halt but fatalities due to road accidents are on the rise and if the spike continues then the number could surpass the pre-Covid-19 tally.
While Covid-19 has to date taken away 4,014 lives since June 2020, when the first death due to Coronavirus was reported, nearly a thousand deaths have occurred during the same period due to accidents on Goa roads. This includes the Covid-19 pandemic phase involving restrictions on travel and State’s tourism sector coming to a grinding halt for months between 2020 and 2021.
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Goa witnessed 2,384 road accidents in 2020 with a death toll of 223, which climbed to 2,851 accidents and 226 deaths in 2021, and 3,011 accidents and 271 fatalities in 2022. During the first four months of this year, the State has already lost 104 precious lives due to accidents.
The lack of preparedness of the government is akin to the poor performance of the government during the second wave of Covid-19 pandemic in Goa in 2021,with no lesson learnt from the first wave in 2020.
The government is literally failing to address the comorbidities such as faulty road designs, lack of speed control infrastructure, stray cattle intrusion on the roads, lack of traffic signals, and, most importantly, lack of police personnel who are like the red blood corpuscles (RBCs) who ensure that the fight continues and the fatalities are minimised and the syndrome is arrested.
Chief Minister Pramod Sawant has repeatedly attributed the increasing number of deaths to drunken driving; however, the simple infrastructure including alcometers have not been provided in adequate numbers to the Goa Police. When O Heraldo last checked, almost one-third of the 100 alcometers allotted to 42 police stations, including traffic cells, were non-functional.
Goa is enroute urbanisation at a super speed and the desire for megalomaniac infrastructure is being fulfilled by creating long and wide roads across the length and breadth of the State. In the urge of better connectivity, the tourism-driven State is being ushered into six-lane and four-lane highways with little consideration, study and analysis of Goa’s inherent populace, and their social and anthropological past and future. What is shocking is that roads are expanded by doing away with footpaths, which will surely increase the number of pedestrian deaths.
An analysis of Government data points out that 63 percent of accidents in 2022 were on the national and state highways, which constitute just five percent of total roads in Goa and 37 percent of fatalities occurred on all the other 95 percent roads of the State. Wearing helmets is certainly a safety measure, however, despite being involved in 34 percent of the accidents, 62 percent of fatalities involved two-wheelers. And not to forget that 19 percent of the road accidents in 2022 involved pedestrians.
Overspeeding led to 91 percent of accidents and 88 percent of the accidents in 2022, yet the police will be busy checking whether a two-wheeler rider is carrying a valid insurance and PUC. The appropriate speed limit markings are missing, in addition to the lack of basic necessary equipment to keep the speed in check. Goa is dependent on 13 radar guns for controlling the speedsters.
The whole idea of infrastructure development has been a copy-paste and the results are already visible with concrete roads which were supposed to last for decades cracking up in less than two years of them being opened for regular traffic.
In October last year, the Chief Minister held an open forum to address the issue, and hundreds of suggestions were received. But even after six months, the meeting has borne no results. Without introspection and analysis, Goa is heading for a generational disaster for hundreds of families in the State due to road accidents.
