Govt engineers to undergo training on road safety

Bhubaneswar: The state government is planning to launch a training curriculum for road engineers in order to hone their knowledge on road safety, officials said on Wednesday. The move is expected to improve defective road designs that often lead to accidents. Upon completion of the training programme, the engineers need to take a test and if they fail to clear it, their annual increment may not be sanctioned.
The decision was taken during a recent meeting of the state road safety council, conducted by commerce and transport minister Tukuni Sahu. “Most of the engineers are not aware of the road engineering-related safety guidelines. Hence, it was decided that all engineers in Odisha will be given training on such guidelines,” stated the minutes of the meeting, which were released on Wednesday.
The government’s decision coincides with the National Road Safety Week, which starts from Wednesday.
Officials of different departments, who attended the meeting, said the issue involving faulty road engineering was raised by development commissioner Pradeep Jena. The senior IAS officer asked the state works department to work on a training module and its duration. He asked the department and the national highway officials to immediately identify the faulty road designs and rectify them for the safety of motorists.
Of the total 5,081 road accident-related deaths that were recorded in Odisha in 2021, at least 30% of them were caused by faulty engineering of roads and the absence of signages. “While an overwhelmingly large number of accidents are caused by rash driving and human error, we still have a scope to reduce the number of fatalities by improving the roads’ infrastructure,” a transport department official said. “Simple road engineering interventions like appropriate road markings and traffic signs and minor layout changes in the roads’ junctions will significantly reduce the number of accidents. Faulty signages and signals are often responsible for massive traffic jams and accidents,” the official added.