In a bid to improve road safety, the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI) will launch a mobile app that will enable users to report traffic violations. The app will be integrated with the transport registration network, and users can register complaints against over-speeding, rash driving, and flouting other traffic rules. The announcement was made by NHAI Chairman Raghav Chandra on Friday.
Speaking during the inauguration of Assocham’s “Roadtech: Role of new technologies & value engineering in construction, maintenance and safety” conference, Chandra said that the app will take a couple of months to develop. It may also allow the user to photograph the vehicle and register a complaint at the push of a button. "All the complaints will get registered in the ledger pertaining to that vehicle whereupon the police/transport department can take further action about it," Chandra said.
In order to improve the highway management network, NHAI will soon be introducing reforms. Chandra said, "In the days to come, I hope to be able to introduce reforms to bring about better management, control, policing of our highways network, I feel with more physical intermediation we should be able to bring about something like patrolling to improve the physical management on roads and I think that will have a significant improvement on road safety.” He also talked about the Road Asset Management System (Rams), that has been commissioned for 3,000km of roads. It will serve as a data bank of the entire 100,000km network of highways in India. It will store data pertaining to quality and width of the road, width of the right of way, encroachment on both sides, etc. It is a World Bank funded project and is part of the government’s Digital India initiative.
NHAI’s initiative is the latest in a slew of measures taken up by governments and law enforcement agencies to track violations of the law through mobile apps. With the increasing number of smartphone users, dedicated apps and other messaging platforms are being utilised to reach out to the public. Police forces and local administrative bodies also operate Whatsapp helpline numbers for people to register complaints.
Source: PTI