The Minister for Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari inaugurated a state-of-the-art road safety centre in New Delhi, the Centre for Advancement of Road Traffic Safety (CARTS), which has been established by SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF), a non-profit working since 2008 on making roads across India safer for all types of road users.With the vision and capability to deliver a significant reduction in road crashes, the Centre will serve as the nodal point for SLF’s and the Ministry of Road Transport and Highway (MoRTH’s) flagship Zero Fatality Corridor (ZFC) and the Zero Fatality District programmes. SaveLIFE’s Zero Fatality Corridor model, a nuanced, innovative and tailor-made approach to making high fatality stretches safer, is currently deployed across a few of the most dangerous state and national highways and expressways across 16 states in India. Following a thorough scientific analysis of these stretches and the crashes witnessed there, interventions across the 4E’s of road safety, namely Engineering, Enforcement, Emergency Care and Engagement, are deployed to make them safer. This 360-degree approach has yielded an over 63% reduction in road crash fatalities on the Old Mumbai Pune Highway (NH 48). On the Mumbai Pune Expressway, the model has delivered a 52% decline in road crash fatalities between 2016 and 2020 and a 38% decline on the Yamuna Expressway between 2019 and 2021. The initiative targets a 50% reduction in road crash fatalities in 100 High Priority Districts and 100 highway corridors in the next 5 years. CARTS has developed a Severity Index for ranking the districts based on road crashes, fatalities, and crash severity. The multi-disciplinary technologically advanced team working out of CARTS will provide the road safety authorities of these districts with the intel and tools necessary to surgically bring forth a decline in road crashes. This collaborative initiative, supported by MoRTH and other road safety stakeholders across India, is an attempt to reduce road crashes, fatalities, and injuries by at least by 50 percent in the coming years. During the inaugural event, Gadkari inspected the various hi-tech crash investigation, analysis and mitigation capabilities present at CARTS, including ZFC Data Dashboards with real-time project information on road lengths, fatality counts, trends and concerns detected in aspects related to enforcement, emergency care and engineering.
Speaking at the CARTS inaugural event, Nitin Gadkari said, “Our government is committed to ensuring that road crashes in India are brought down with urgency. The use of technology and innovation is extremely important in the current times given the magnitude of the problem at hand and what we want to achieve. With that in mind, we welcome this much-needed initiative and are happy to lend the Centre for Advancement of Road Traffic Safety (CARTS) our full support. I congratulate SaveLIFE Foundation on this initiative.”Each year, India loses approximately 1.5 lakh people to road crashes. What makes this problem even more alarming is the fact that a majority of road crash victims belong to low-income households and face tremendous hardships in the aftermath of a road crash. Not only is their road to recovery harder and longer but the demise of a breadwinner from such households or life-long disabilities in such situations are capable of pushing entire families below the poverty line for decades.