RAWALPINDI, Aug 23: The National Road Safety Secretariat, while preparing the country’s first-ever road safety plan for 2007-2012, has estimated that the economic cost of road crashes and injuries in the country each year is over Rs100 billion or 1.5 per cent of the Gross National Product (GNP).

At present, Pakistan faces a road safety crisis that has not been fully recognized. This is evident from lack of resources assigned to road safety programmes. Institutional capacity and ‘road safety champions’ within agencies still need to be developed.

The Road Safety Plan will come into force when approved by the National Road Safety Council, likely to meet in the first week of September. The council is headed by the federal minister for communications, with the federal ministers for education and health and the transport ministers of all the four provinces as members.

Given the institutional setting of road safety in Pakistan, there is no national-level road safety policy, strategy or action plan. NRSS was established last year by the ministry of communications with the mandate to develop Pakistan’s first national road safety plan.

The draft plan, however, says the loss to the economy is greater than the numbers suggest, as road traffic injuries push many families deeper into poverty when their bread-winners die, inflicting a continuous burden on the disabled victims and their families and on the health care system.

Through development and implementation of the plan, the National Road Safety Secretariat will ensure safer designs, construction and maintenance of road networks and raise safety awareness.

The purpose of the National Road Safety Plan is to promote the best practices and strategies that, when implemented, could have a substantial impact on reducing fatalities and injuries during crashes and to identify the major areas where NRSS, and its member agencies, could focus its resources and expertise to achieve a reduction in crashes, fatalities and injuries, said Aizaz Ahmed, executive director of NRSS, while talking to Dawn.

The plan is a policy document inviting all road safety stakeholders, particularly public agencies to develop their action plans, using this plan as a base document, he said.

The data collected by NRSS from 21 hospitals in 112 districts—about 19 per cent of district hospitals— reflect that road transport crash (RTCs) casualties, both fatalities and serious injuries, are 3.20 per 1,000 population. If this rate is applied to the country’s population, the projected annual RTCs for Pakistan are about 500,000.

The results of the National Injury Survey of Pakistan estimated that the incidence of road transport injuries were 15.0 (including minor injuries) per 1,000 per year. Using these figures, the estimated motor vehicle injuries in 2006 were about two million, says the plan.

Road design in future will increasingly focus on safety of all users, with special consideration for pedestrians and cyclists. They should be separated from traffic wherever possible, or vehicle speed be reduced in certain areas, the plan says.

The plan observed that the way licenses were issued is allowing a number of untrained, unskilled and illiterate drivers due to a lax approach towards issuance of driving licenses.

A survey, conducted as part of UNDP study, revealed that hardly three to four per cent of drivers had gone through formal training before getting a license. A random survey of taxi and bus drivers revealed that only five per cent went through a test before being issued a driving license.

The plan envisages vehicle safety programme to reduce highway fatalities by improving the safety performance of motor vehicles through the conduct of research, issuance of safety standards, investigations and mitigation regarding defects, and enforcement of safety standard compliance.

The plan recommended that light vehicles be tested after three years and then annually.