India:one per cent vehicles, 10 per cent road crash victims-Word Bank

India has  only one per cent of the world's vehicles, but accounts for 10 per cent of all road crash victims, the latest World Bank report on road safety said on Saturday.Hartwig Schafer, World Bank's Vice President for South Asia, said the Indian government in recent years has taken significant steps to address the issues related to road safety. This is something where, in particular in India, we have to pay attention, Schafer told PTI in an interview on the occasion of the release of the report on road safety in New Delhi.While the attention in the last year has shifted due to COVID-19, there is an interesting link between road safety and pandemic right now, he noted.
Unfortunately, the road crashes have not been going down and any time 10 per cent of the capacity in hospitals is being used for the treatment crash victims, he said. Schafer said road crashes actually hit the poorest and the most vulnerable segments of the populations."The financial impact of the crash is much more on poorer households than on better-off households. It is much higher on women who have to take care of the burden of caregiving. It is much higher on those who rely on foot and also in the informal sector," he said. However, according to Schafer, the good thing is that India was doing quite a bit on road safety.Last year, India amended its Motor Vehicle (Amendment) Act, which is bringing a lot of innovation in terms of financing, protection and enforcement to the fore, he said.
Responding to a question, Schafer said that Tamil Nadu is one of the states which has reduced the number of crash fatalities by 25 per cent.For us in the bank, this is a major part of our engagement in the transport sector -- rural transport, urban transport -- the focus on new mobility post-COVID is something that we are doing, he said. In South Asia, he said, the World Bank is helping in road safety standards and institutional aspects of it as well.Building a safe infrastructure is one of the key aspects of addressing this major challenge, he said.