Representative TOI file photo

NEW DELHI: More than 90 per cent of road deaths in 2016 were attributed to rash and negligent driving with the latest National Crime Research Bureau ( NCRB ) statistics revealing 1.5 lakh deaths in 1.35 lakh road accidents due to delinquent driving.

The crime data released by the bureau covers all crimes booked under Indian Panel Code . The NCRB is yet to release its data on all accidents and suicides that were reported during 2016, which includes those where FIRs are filed.

While the NCRB covers all IPC data, as of now only the road transport ministry has records of all road accidents in 2016. As per this report, 1.51 lakh people died in road accidents and a driver's fault was responsible for 80.3 per cent of these fatalities. Some road safety experts have raised questions on such details and argued that there might be lack of proper investigation in many road accident deaths.

The NCRB report is not surprising considering the agency has been following the same parameters for several years. For example, in 2015 out of a total 1.49 lakh people dying in road accidents, 1.34 lakh were due to rash and negligent driving. This works out to be 90.3 per cent.

It has sometimes been argued that road accident deaths are entered under negligent and rash driving in FIRs as piecing together accidents is not always easy. "There is no clause in IPC to put a road accident caused due to pothole or bad engineering. In most of the cases, police reach the spot after accidents have happened and hence they mainly depend on eyewitness accounts. Usually, these eyewitnesses say the vehicle was moving fast," said a senior police officer. This may lead to an inflation of accidents where negligent driving is the cause, but this remains the chief cause of deaths on the roads.

Since victims of road accidents are mainly compensated from the accumulated third-party insurance premium collected from vehicles, most of the cases are registered under rash and negligent driving head, he added.

"Across the world countries that have brought down road deaths have first done work to get the right data, find the exact reasons. Unless we do this ground work, we won't be able to treat the disease," said road safety expert Rohit Baluja.

