Road accidents and related fatalities have become alarmingly common in Nepal, with scarcely a day passing without tragic news. According to a Nepal Police report, an average of 75 road accidents occur daily on our roads, claiming around seven lives. What’s more, in the past Nepali month of Poush alone (mid-December to mid-January), 197 people died in 2,276 accidents, while 3,417 were injured. In the last fiscal year, more than 2,000 people lost their lives in road accidents. At this rate, the country’s target of cutting road deaths by 50 percent by 2030 will be a distant dream. These statistics highlight the urgent need to take road accidents more seriously.

Cutting down on road accidents and casualties has not been a priority for multiple reasons. On the one hand, Nepal has failed to ensure road safety at a policy level, as a comprehensive road safety legislation is yet to be enacted. This is unfortunate, as its absence has halted extensive awareness and education programmes as well as identification and monitoring of accident-prone areas. Likewise, other important tasks like boosting road safety through engineering, vehicle inspections, implementation of traffic regulations, and upskilling drivers have also been ignored. There is also a shortage of good road infrastructure. For instance, roads riddled with potholes and poorly maintained stretches continue to pose hazards to riders. Concomitantly, not all roads are adequately tarred or vehicle friendly. In many remote areas, travelling is akin to courting disasters.

Mass awareness through license tests and traffic rules education classes for rule violators have been conducted under the initiative of the traffic police, yet road accidents haven’t declined. There is a lot of work to be done to control speeding. Even in the federal capital, Kathmandu, the automatic overspeed-tracking cameras are placed in limited spaces. These tools and traffic police’s random vehicle speed checks are inadequate for more than 1.2 million two-wheelers and over 300,000 four-wheelers plying the city streets. The situation is dire in remote places like Karnali Province, where overspeeding often goes unchecked, resulting in frequent accidents.

Of the accidents in the same one-month period, 1,160 were due to overspeeding, followed by drinking and driving. Preventing road accidents and deaths is not the sole responsibility of the government; the general public must also be mindful of their actions. Motorcyclists, in particular, are blatant flouters of traffic rules. The police report indicates that of the 3,374 vehicles that met with accidents in the span of a month, around 70 percent were motorcycles. Similarly, cars accounted for 13 percent of accidents, followed by almost 6 percent for buses. Even as the traffic police have been conducting drink-driving tests, the issue persists (of the total accidents, 247 occurred due to it). Thus prevention of road accidents is by necessity a collaborative effort between the motorists and the enforcers of traffic rules.

Given the scale of the problem, the roles of all three levels of government are vital to enhance road infrastructure and to strengthen surveillance and punishment of rule violations. What we currently see are the provinces and the local level bodies endlessly quarrel over their jurisdictions when it comes to developing road infrastructure. Such conflicts cost lives. Again, only broadly collaborative efforts are likely to work.