The India chapter (IRF India) of the International Road Federation (IRF) was established in 2005 and is registered under the Societies Registration Act under the parent body of International Road Federation (Geneva Programme Centre). It is a not-for-profit organisation representing governments, highway authorities, research organisations, universities, professional associations and infrastructure development companies, manufacturers and suppliers of road infrastructure elements and NGOs.
IRF-IC’s mission is to promote the development of safe and forgiving road network for all categories of road users to enable uniform access and sustainable mobility. With this mission, IRF-IC has started a series of 12 webinars in 2021; the first webinar was conducted on February 9, with the inauguration of the series by Honourable Union Minister Shri Nitin Gadkari, Minister for Road Transport and Highways and MSME.
The objective of the webinar series is to create an awareness and commitment of all stakeholders of road safety across the country as well as to draw the knowledge and expertise from international experts with the latest tools and techniques including their success stories. More than 1,50,000 people face road death every year and another 450,000 are inflicted with severe injuries in road accidents in our country. The glaring fact of this painful story is that a majority of these victims with death and injuries are the vulnerable road users, who are at lower economic strata of the society.
At present the road safety has assumed an important position in everyone’s mind as well as the governments and policy planners. However, in absence of accurate and reliable accident data for all road accidents in the country in a uniform format, all the interventions are just based on some opinions of those who can influence. None of the actions for road safety improvement plan are evidence based (or derived from accurate and factual database), and all these adhoc interventions have not been able to produce any positive results. The proof of this is surely seen in the growing road deaths during the last one decade during which India was committed to reduce road deaths to 50 per cent as part of the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety (2011-2020).
The series of 12 webinars are expected to cover all aspects of road safety covering the road safety engineering (with both improved road designs and safer vehicles), effective education and awareness for safety culture, modernised enforcement by use of technologies, and emergency response as per global standards. However, to make all these actions fully evidence based, road accident data shall have to be collected in digital platform for sharing across all stakeholders for their respective institutional management of road safety with their most appropriate actions/interventions.
The global community in the beginning of 2020 agreed for a set of 12 targets and planned to develop a structured action plan for road safety in each country as the first target to be achieved by 2020. However, as the year 2020 was a difficult year when all the nations were busy tackling the serious problem of Covid-19 pandemic, India also could not prepare the action plan. This webinar series is expecting to collate and compile all the ideas generated through the webinar series and prepare the action Plan, in discussion with all concerned Ministries and stakeholder organisations, to be adopted by the Government of India for driving the road safety mission during the decade for the targets to be achieved by 2030, which is 50 per cent road deaths by 2030. IRF-IC has taken up this task to coordinate and develop a concrete and structured action plan, on behalf of the Government, in consultation with all the concerned ministries.
