The Bihar State Road Safety Council (BSRSC) has identified 21 highly accident-prone spots across eight districts in a first-of-its-kind initiative in the state.
In road safety parlance, such places are called "black spots", and they have been identified in Gopalganj, Samastipur, Khagaria, Bhagalpur, Gaya, Patna, East Champaran and Begusarai.
The council, headed by transport minister Chandrika Rai, is now gearing up to take steps to minimise the number of accidents at such spots.
Though there are various methods to identify or determine black spots, the 15-member council team decided to declare any stretch of road as a black spot if 10 accidents occurred on it in a calendar year. The length of such stretches to consider the number of accidents has been fixed at 200m for urban areas, 400m for semi-urban areas and 600m for rural areas.
"We have just started the work to identify black spots in the state and have identified 21 of them. The list is an interim one, and is by no means exhaustive. Surveys are being conducted with the help of the road construction department and the police to identify such spots in other districts too," transport department principal secretary and BSRSC member Sujata Chaturvedi told The Telegraph.
All the black spots detected so far in Bihar are located on the National Highways and Sujata said their identification was of prime importance as it formed a vital part of the road safety action plan for the state.
"Identification of black spots and the reasons behind accidents would help us take corrective steps. We could make suitable plans for movement of traffic, construct speed breakers or install signage to warn drivers. Road safety is in rudimentary stage in the state and we will take institution building measures to improve it," she added.
A road construction department executive engineer pointed out that though the Union ministry of road transport and highways has fixed the guideline for marking a place as a black spot only if 10 accidents occur there for three consecutive years, it was tweaked by the BSRSC to one year only owing to lack of reliable data on road accidents of the previous years.
"So far we have discovered that the pre-dominant reasons for accidents at these black spots have been over-speeding, overloading of vehicles, rash driving and underage driving. These will have to addressed to cut down accidents and the resulting loss in lives and property," he added.
Sanjeev Sinha, professor of civil engineering and dean (planning and development) at National Institute of Technology (NIT) Patna, an expert on traffic related issues and has been a member of editorial board of Journal of Society for Transport and Traffic Studies, said: "There could be several hundred black spots in the state and investigation should be conducted to discover the exact reasons behind accidents before taking remedial measures."
He added: "There are things like geometry of the stretch of road, behaviour of the driver, time of accident, environment conditions like fog or rain, materials dumped on road. Remedial measures will succeed only if we understand the reasons behind the mishaps."
According to statistics maintained by Bihar police, there were 9,555 road accidents during the 2015 calendar year in the state resulting in the death of 5,421 people and injury to more than 6,835 persons.
