Mumbai: As Maharashtra paid tribute to late BJP leader and former union minister Gopinath Munde, who died a year ago in an accident in Delhi, his daughter Pankaja said that after her father’s death, people have started talking about road safety.
Munde, a popular Backward Caste leader from Maharashtra, died due to shock and haemorrhage following injuries to his neck and liver.
Pankaja, who is Maharashtra’s rural development minister, told a TV channel, which is carrying a campaign on road safety, “I am not disappointed. I am rather thinking and taking it positively that people have started thinking about it. After my father, a lot of people approached me and started talking about road safety rules.”
She said new ideas would be welcomed if they could save lives.
She said she was willing to talk to the concerned minister, that is Union Road Transport Minister Nitin Gadkari, “if my views are taken into account.”
The Road Safety and Transport Bill, 2014, which was to replace the existing Motor Vehicles Act 1988 is still in a limbo even as road accidents continue to kill more than 100,000 people every year. Gadkari has promised that the Bill would be presented in the next session of Parliament.
According to a PTI report, “a group of organisations has demanded strengthening of the proposed Road Safety Bill, several provisions of which, they claimed, have been ‘watered down’.”
The NGOs have launched a website, www.roadsafetyatrisk.in, which lets road users send a letter to Prime Minister Narendra Modi seeking his intervention in the matter.
Questioning the government’s position on the Bill, they have said in a statement, “In the latest version of the Bill available on the Ministry’s website, statutes to hold road contractors, automobile manufacturers, transporters and rash drivers accountable have been watered down.”
India has a poor record of maintaining safety on its roads, especially on its highways with the National Crime Records Bureau registering more than 1.5 million people being killed in road accidents in the country since 2001.
Meanwhile, tributes were paid to Munde, especially in his hometown Beed, as BJP workers remembered the leader’s contribution to Maharashtra’s development.
Chief Minsiter Devendra Fadnavis said, “My heartfelt tributes to our beloved leader Gopinath Munde on his ‘smruti din’. We will walk on the path shown by him and fulfil his dreams.” The Ahmadnagar-Beed-Parli Vaijnath railway project for which the state will contribute 50 per cent of the cost “is a tribute to him.” said Fadnavis.
