Visakhapatnam: Saying that traffic offenders are rarely deterred by paltry fines, DGP of Andhra Pradesh N. Sambasiva Rao advised the police to book the repeated and major traffic offenders under Section 279 of IPC instead of Motor Vehicle Act-1988 to punish with a jail term. Inaugurating the two-day workshop on ‘Training for trainers on road safety' here on Friday, Mr Sambasiva Rao said, in Andhra Pradesh, over 1.1 lakh cases are registered in a year. Among them, over 25,000 cases are pertaining to road accidents with over 8,000 fatalities. Over 82 per cent victims in the road accidents were men, bread winners of the family, he added.
There is urgent need to scale up the enforcement to mitigate the road accidents in the state as too much blood spills on the road have led to loss of human resources. The AP top cop told the officials not to book cases against erring motorists, including drunk drivers and those driving on the wrong route, under MV Act but book them under Section 279 of IPC to deter the traffic violators.
The police and road transport officials have identified over 11, 000 black spots and are talking to the concerned authorities of NHAI and local bodies to do some road engineering to rectify the defects. “We have observed that over 40 per cent of the road accidents have been reported from T and Y Junctions on NHs in the state,” the DGP added. “My sincere advice to the police and other concerned departments is to visit the bereaved families, in plain clothes to understand how road accidents can devastate the families,” DGP said.
Claiming that Chief Minister N. Chandrababu Naidu has been giving top priority to bring down road accidents, the DGP said Mr Naidu has allotted 126 new road safety vehicles across the 13 districts, exclusively for the NH-16 and also sanctioned Rs 25 crore for road safety project. The road safety vehicles are equipped to undertake enforcement and take necessary steps to save lives from road accidents by attending promptly during the golden one hour period,” he added.
