Focus on creating infrastructure that is safe, accessible for all: Nitin Gadkari

Gadkari acknowledged the dichotomy between building super-fast roads to bring cities closer in the country and ensuring safety of passengers as well as pedestrians.

Union minister for road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari has shed light on the challenges his ministry faces over enforcement of traffic rules, which falls under the purview of the states. Following the recent death of former Tata Sons chairperson Cyrus Mistry in a car accident on the Ahmedabad-Mumbai highway, Gadkari also acknowledged the dichotomy between building super-fast roads to bring cities closer in the country and ensuring safety of passengers as well as pedestrians.

In an interview to Hindustan Times, talks about road safety. He also listed out the expressways that would be ready in a year from now and talked about the government’s plan to reduce vehicular traffic by providing cheaper environment-friendly public transport.

Excerpts from the interview

You say that highways and expressways constitute only 1-2% of all roads in India, but nearly 60% of all road accident deaths in 2021 have occurred on national highways, state highways and expressways. Why is that so and what are you doing to better the situation?

See roads are a vital aspect of an economy. Better the connectivity, more the employment, more the business and a prosperous economy. The focus should be on creating infrastructure that is safe and accessible for all. After this unfortunate accident which killed my dear friend Cyrus Mistry, I also took up the issue of reviewing speed limits in the meeting of the Transport Development Council which happened in Bengaluru on Friday (September 9).

We have single lane, two lane, four lane, six lane, eight lane roads and now we also have four lane, six lane and even 12-lane access-controlled roads. The speed limits are very arbitrary and often are not set with a scientific approach. The plan is to set speed limits for all these categories of roads in consultation with states. Because notifying speed limits is a state subject, we cannot do it on our own.

Similarly, enforcing traffic rules is a state subject. Not wearing seat belts even in the rear seat is already a traffic offence. But, traffic police of any state hardly prosecute people for that. But now I am trying to work out a way in which the Centre can collaborate and take stock of traffic rule enforcement by the state governments. At least in our highways and expressways, I am going to expand the scope of the intelligent traffic management system (ITMS) to automatically detect and challan vehicles if a passenger inside is not found wearing a seatbelt.

As you know, I have already ordered making of seat belt alarms mandatory for rear seats in all vehicles as well.

Also, the Ahmedabad-Mumbai highway where the accident happened is now overcrowded. The Delhi Mumbai expressway will be a 12-lane access-controlled corridor which is coming up and it will take significant load off from the Ahmedabad-Mumbai highway.

I am also pushing for changing the type of horns to something soothing, say a flute or a mouth organ.

But experts have said that may not be feasible because horns are set as per international standards and it must be heard in the ambient environment of a road or a traffic junction…

There is a solution for everything. If not for musical instruments, maybe we can reduce the decibel level of the horn to 70 and limit the duration of a single horn. I am not in favour of the constant honking where people just keep pressing the horn. Sleep detection and alarm systems in cars work that way, they don’t honk to wake up the driver.

Implementation of Bharat NCAP (new car assessment program) and the rule for 6 airbags in all vehicles is running behind schedule. What is the reason?

Standards for Bharat NCAP have been made. With this, cars will start getting star ratings in India enabling manufacturers to strive for building safer cars and people to make informed choices while buying a car. Within a year it will be implemented.

On the airbag regulation, that too will be implemented soon. In a month or two hopefully.

Your ministry is going equally big on ropeways and about 165 such projects have already been approved. But even there we saw the ropeway accident in Jharkhand’s Deoghar in April this year which turned out to be a challenging rescue operation killing two people. Has the government formulated any uniform standard or safety parameter for ropeways?

The ropeway in Jharkhand was old and its design was such that people faced a lot of difficulty in the rescue operation. Yes, now I can say that we have prepared a set of international standards and parameters for which I even sent a team to Europe to study their models and technology. So, all the ropeways that will come up in India will be of European or American standards. Safety will be the top priority. It will have evacuation protocols laid down. The ropeway system itself will have multiple backups.

You have frequently talked about multiple modes of public transportation. Could you list the projects that you’re currently monitoring?

Our plan is not just limited to ropeway, cable car and funicular railways. We are also planning to build a skybus system between Delhi’s Dhaula Kuan and Haryana’s Manesar that will carry 200 people at a time.

The plan is to decongest roads by creating multiple transport mediums that are both economically viable and are also environment-friendly. We are also working on introducing trolleybuses that run on cable, it carries 88 people at a time and has lower capital cost than even an electric bus. A 50-seater electric bus that runs on lithium-ion battery costs ₹1.25 crore, this trolley bus costs ₹60 lakh. Like this, we have to think of cheaper and yet comfortable transport solutions because our country is poor and the paying capacity of the majority population is fairly low.

With the same intention of providing cheaper transportation solutions, we are also working hard to introduce alternative fuel options such as electricity, green hydrogen, ethanol, methanol, bio-diesel, LNG, bio-LNG and bio-CNG. I don’t think that the day is far behind when our farmers will also become producers of energy.