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At a time when India has set an ambitious target to lower road accident deaths by half by 2020, the country is looking to improve its quality and pace of data collection and eventually come out with quarterly reports.
The Transport Research Wing (TRW) of the Road Transport Ministry, which has taken steps towards better reporting of accidents, also wants to speed up the data collection process to generate quarterly reports. To begin with, it has changed the reporting format and has asked all States to adopt it at the earliest.
“Generation of quarterly reports will help identify actionable points faster. Although it’s an ambitious target, TRW and the Ministry have been trying to generate its reports earlier in the year,” said a TRW official. TRW also wants to generate the annual reports faster — a journey on which it has already begun.
Earlier, these reports were generated around September. Last year, it was ready in May, and this year, TRW wants the report ready by April.
New format readyTowards this end, a committee set up under TRW has worked out a format for capturing accident-related data, and expects it to be adopted in 2017 itself.
As per the changed format, the job done by the police at the State level will be broken down into recording primary data objectively at the first level, and subsequently reporting data at the secondary level, said a TRW official.
“We have already shared it with the State chief secretaries,” said Kirti Saxena, Senior Advisor, TRW.
Earlier, the accident data reporting format varied across States and police was straightaway expected to report on the causes, a move that allowed certain biases to creep in.
Also, since the police force is usually overworked or engaged in crime control or VIP protection, it leaves less time for it to capture accident-related issues.
The first round of data, or primary data, is captured by police and the form is aimed at helping police capture data in an easy format and remove the subjectivity, said Geetam Tiwari from IIT-Delhi and Sudeshna Mitra from IIT-Kharagpur during a conference here.
The Road Transport Ministry had formed a committee headed by Senior Advisor, TRW, and had included experts from IIT-Delhi and IIT-Kharagpur, World Health Organisation, senior officials from the transport departments, Health Ministry and police.
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