Engg students to study black spots across Karnataka

BENGALURU: According to official data, the state has 674 black spots that can cause accidents. With the lack of officers on ground, the Public Works Department (PWD), Road Safety Authority (RSA) and other stakeholders plan to rope in engineers from various colleges in order to conduct surveys and study these spots.

According to an RSA official, various colleges from the districts will be shortlisted. From every college, civil or transport engineering students and one senior faculty member, along with a master’s student of the same discipline will carry out the exercise. They will file a report of their findings and submit it to the RSA for further action. The PWD chief engineer is the nodal officer of the initiative.

“This has been pending for a while and at a meeting last week, we discussed bringing in college students. The order is yet to be passed. We have selected a few black spots which students can study. The final list is yet to be drafted,” H C Ramendra, PWD chief engineer said. The initiative came in after observing a drop in road accident fatalities by 24.39 per cent in Tamil Nadu after bringing in students of IIT Madras.
In addition to this, a Time Bound Action Plan has also been sent to all District Commissioners (DC) to focus on various factors such as technical analysis, situation analysis, data information and correction of blackspots among other factors.

Bengaluru ranks third in the state in terms of the number of blackspots with 47, after Tumakuru and Udupi with 91 and 51 respectively. As per the recent meeting, a comparative study was carried out on the increase in injuries due to road accidents.

From January to June 2019 the number of accidents recorded was 21,656. Though the number of fatalities has come down from 5,832 to 5,601, the number of cases of injuries has increased from 26,892 to 27,656 in the state. Karnataka was third among 13 states in terms of fatalities across the country.