New Delhi: The International Road Federation (IRF), the Geneva-based global body working for better and safer roads worldwide, has written to road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari urging him to circulate the scientific guidelines developed by the Indian Road Congress (IRC) for identifying and treating the blackspots in the country.
"The blackspots / grey spots removal from the road network definitely makes for a distinct and measurable difference in the road safety outcome in the states as measured through their accident / crash data records. However, the present ongoing blackspot programme delivered till date is without any appropriate scientific guidelines for investigation and rectification being used by the field officers of MoRTH, NHAI and NHIDCL," said K.K. Kapila, President, Emeritus, International Road Federation, in his letter to Gadkari.
"All countermeasures - short term, medium term and long term - adopted by the field officers assigned to remove blackspots are totally ad-hoc without any basis of scientific investigation for the blackspot / grey spot, uniformly across the country."
The letter mentions that the Scientific Committee of the Indian Roads Congress has already developed and finalised Guidelines for Rectification of blackspots after approval of various committees.
These guidelines, IRF said, are required to be urgently released as electronic copies to all the three concerned agencies, viz. MoRTH, NHAI and NHIDCL to enable faster dissemination to all their field officials. Besides this, it may also be uploaded on all the concerned Websites which will help in tackling the blackspots and grey spots in a scientific manner, in line with the IRC Guidelines. For effective usage of the Guidelines, the field engineers should be imparted a short 3-4 hours training on the procedure to get the addressal of the blackspots done appropriately, Added Kapila.
