Bhubaneswar: The state government has urged the Centre to include Odisha under Integrated Road Accident Database (IRAD) system to ensure proper monitoring of rising road mishaps.
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) with support of IIT-Madras and National Informatics Centre (NIC) has developed the IRAD system. The ministry has planned to roll out the project in six states with highest fatalities from road crashes — Karnataka, Madhya Pradesh, Maharashtra, Rajasthan, Tamil Nadu and Uttar Pradesh on pilot basis. Later, it will be extended to whole country.
However, the state government wanted to be included in the project on the pilot phase. State Transport and Commerce secretary Madhu Sudan Padhi has recently written to MoRTH director (Road Safety) Paresh Kumar Goel in this regard.
“It is requested to launch IRAD in the state as a pilot project immediately. All required steps will be taken for successful implementation of the scheme. In the state, we have a lead agency on road safety with full time staff to monitor road safety activities,” Padhi said in his letter.
At present, the state government is manually collecting data on fatal accident or cases with grievous injury by the officials of RTO and police.
The collection of information through IRAD would help expedite the process of identification of black spots apart from prioritising and designing the short/long/medium term measures to mitigate these hazards and monitoring the impact of these road safety measures, he said.
Moreover, Padhi said, digital recording of accidents directly from the spot using a hand-held tablet and geo-tagging of the accident location will also ensure accuracy. It will also help achieve faster, better post-processing, analysis and presentation of data.