Cap speed at 100 kmph on India’s highways, demand road safety experts

Representation pic

After statistics and studies claimed that 70 per cent of road mishaps in 2021 were due to over speeding, and rattled by increasing accidents along expressways - especially the latest one on Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Expressway that killed six people - the Road Safety Network (RSN), has appealed to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways demanding a 100-kmph speed limit on highways. The RSN is a coalition of organisations working with evidence-based approach and its members wrote to the ministry on Wednesday.

The Ministry had begun the process of raising speed limits on expressways from 100 kmph to 120 kmph around 2018. Road safety experts have sought its roll back. Currently, highways have a speed limit of 100 kmph, while on expressways the speed limit is 120 kmph. However, state police are authorised to decide on speed limits for their areas due to which, different National Highways have different speed limits.

Speed is the biggest contributor to fatalities in road crashes, contributing about 70% of the total deaths in road crashes in 2021 as per the annual Ministry of Road Transport and Highways of India's ‘Road Accidents in India' report. The number of persons killed in road crashes due to speed reached 1,07,236 in 2021, the highest in the past 10 years. The Ministry recently raised the speed limits on expressways to 120 kmph, which has been called into caution by road safety experts, as per the letter written by the RSN.

Also Read: Maharashtra: Not a single stop to take break on Samruddhi Mahamarg expressway

The recent accident on the Mumbai-Nagpur Samruddhi Expressway killed six persons. File pic/Sameer Markande

Ranjit Gadgil, programme director from Parisar, a body working on road safety and sustainable development, and a part of the Road Safety Network, said, "Reducing speed limits to safer levels along with its effective enforcement and proper monitoring will help in reducing the deaths in a short span of time. Nitin Gadkari has committed himself to reducing road crash related deaths by half by 2025, much ahead of the targeted year 2030. Addressing speed by reducing speed limits to safer levels will help in achieving this target."

The government is trying to cut down distance and save time by building expressways and highways but road safety professionals said it is more about saving lives. "Do you want to travel faster or travel safely? This is about overall public safety and saving lives. We can see that countries abroad have high speeds, but we cannot replicate it here immediately. We need to start with basics like improving road engineering parameters, training our drivers professionally and improving vehicles, and make them more road worthy and safer. We cannot ignore all these things and just increase speed, but need to improve overall safety parameters from all aspects. Once all this basic infrastructure of boosting safety parameters is in place, we can increase speed. Our appeal is to improve the overall safety infra, get prepared for it and then increase speeds of vehicles," said Sandeep Gaikwad, senior programme associate, Parisar.

"Addressing even this single risk factor of ‘speed' will help us in immediately reducing the number of deaths considerably. Therefore, we request you to reduce the legally prescribed speed limit to the level of year 2014 at 100 kmph," Dr Sanskriti Menon, Senior Programme Director, Centre for Environment Education (CEE), part of the Road Safety Network said. The RSN also stressed for establishment of a National Road Safety Board, an independent experts' body which can help strengthen the frameworks for improving road safety in the country.

1,07,236
No of people killed in road crashes due to speed in 2021