National highways to get safety star ratings

India’s roads are known to be very unsafe, and the country’s national highways are no exception. However, there will soon be a new way for drivers to give feedback on these roads, so more awareness can be raised about their true safety levels.

The International Road Assessment Program (or IRAP) will soon be carrying out a survey of the national highways in India, in which people can rate the highways on a scale of zero stars to five stars based on their safety parameters. The survey is being funded by both the World Bank and Bloomberg Philanthropies.

Beforehand, a similar survey had covered over 10,000 kilometres of state highways in Rajasthan, Gujarat, Karnataka, Kerala, Assam, Uttar Pradesh, Andhra Pradesh, Tamil Nadu, and Telangana between 2010 and 2015.

This survey’s results had shown that at least 75% of these stretches of road received ratings of two stars or less. Additionally, this survey showed that these highways were far less safe for motorcyclists, cyclists, and pedestrians than for normal four-wheel vehicle drivers.

Thus, these results prove that Indian roads are in definite need of increased safety parameters, and the IRAP is planning to do just that with their star ratings of India’s national highways.

According to Rob McInerney, the IRAP has found that a substantial number of accidents and fatalities can be avoided by even increasing the star rating on roads by just one rank.

This can be especially helpful in the case of India’s national highways, since, although the national and state highways only comprise 5% of all Indian roads, they account for over 60% of all of the road fatalities in the country. In 2016, for example, over 90,000 people died in crashes on these roads.

However, now, IRAP’s initiative hopes to bring down this number by analyzing the current safety parameters of these roads through the star rating, improving the roads based on these analyses, and finally, raising the ratings, and thus, the safety, of Indian highways.

Image by Rajesh Balouria from Pixabay (Free for commercial use)

Image Reference: https://pixabay.com/photos/highways-road-traffic-asphalt-4548844/