Format of registering road accidents changes in India as Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) announces a new criteria applicable in all states and UTs
Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (moRTH) has announced a new format for registering the road accidents, which will be applied by the police personnel in all the states and UTs. The new accident reporting format has been developed with suggestion from an expert committee. According to the ministry, this new format will help to make accident recording process much easier for police.
This new format will also help the authorities to access valuable data and analysis them to prevent further accidents. Once adopted, the format will minimize the subjectivity and increase the chance to accumulate data for analysis. Currently, FIRs are filed at police stations to record the accident data. This way, the police personnel use their personal understanding to fill up the data subjectively.
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The police personnel registering the accident data interpret the incident according to their knowledge. Many times, the limited technical knowledge, lack of understanding of road engineering defects or any other technical faults leas to the missing of important data or create loopholes. This leads certain details of the accident being unreported or sometime under reported.
With the new accident reporting format in place, the entire process will be more streamlined. The accident data recording form comes with five sections, designed to register all the relevant information. It will include accident identification, location, road condition, vehicles involved in the accident and victim details. The ministry claims, this new format will record the details of the accident site in such manner, which will help in further road designing to minimize the chance of accident.
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To develop the new format, MoRTH formed an expert committee. This included experts from IIT Delhi, IIT Kharagpur, WHO, senior police officers, senior officer from state transport departments and officials from Ministry of Health and Family Welfare. Apart from the five sectioned form, the committee has also devised a new corresponding annual road accident data reporting format that comes comprising 17 different forms. The states and union territories will be asked to furnish details of road accident data through those forms.