Former Tata Group chairman Cyrus Mistry was killed in a road accident on the National Highway in Maharashtra’s Palghar district. The tragedy has once again spotlighted the high numbers of fatalities that Indian roads witness every year.
Details –
- According to data collected by the National Crime Records Bureau (NCRB), there are around 1.5 lakh deaths on India’s roads every year, of which one third are accounted for by National Highways.
- According to the data, in the past five years, while road accidents dipped from 4,45,730 in 2017 to 4,03,116 in 2021, deaths in these accidents increased from 1,50,093 to 1,55,622 in the same period.
- A similar trend is seen on the National Highways. While the number of accidents on National Highways in 2017 stood at 1,30,942, as many as 50,859 people died in them.
- In 2021, while the number of National Highway accidents dipped to 1,22,204, the number of deaths increased to 53,615.
- According to the data, barring the pandemic year of 2020, which saw long periods of lockdowns, the data on accidents and deaths have been consistently hovering around 4.4 lakh and 1.5 lakh respectively through the period between 2017 and 2021.
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