The Gautam Buddh Nagar police on Wednesday started a special month-long awareness campaign aimed at educating citizens about traffic guidelines and enforcing rule compliance by road users across Noida and Greater Noida.
Police Commissioner Laxmi Singh and District Magistrate Manish Kumar Verma flagged off the campaign from the commissionerate office in Sector 108, with Additional CP Anand Kulkarni, DCP (Traffic) Anil Kumar Yadav, DCP (Crime) Rajiv Dixit, DCP (Noida) Harish Chander, among other officers, in presence.
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Addressing a gathering comprising representatives of auto unions, truckers’ associations, residents’ bodies, NGOs, industries, children from different schools, NCC scouts, and road safety volunteers, Singh stressed the need for “social consciousness and collective responsibility” on the part of citizens, especially the youth.
She said it is the responsibility of the youngsters, to comply with traffic rules in their daily lifestyle and called on citizens for collective effort in curbing the violation of road rules.
“The awareness drives are more than just campaigns by state and central governments. They are on a mission to create awareness that whatever is happening on the roads, should it continue as it is? If we deploy police force at every nook and corner, can we totally prevent whatever is happening on the roads unless road users take on the responsibility of keeping themselves and others safe,” Singh emphasised.
The senior IPS officer invoked NCRB’s data to say the number of people killed in road accidents is four times more than those dying in murders. She said this is happening at a time when good roads have been built and superior quality vehicles with a lot of safety measures have been made.
“Despite all of this, why has the number of road accidents not gone down? Because somewhere we consider ourselves to be gods. Whenever we see newspaper reports about some accidents and deaths, we think it has happened with others and can never happen with us,” she said.
“If we take just a little caution and keep such news reports in mind, we can help prevent a lot of accidents on roads. But instead, we believe nothing wrong will happen to us. We see two-wheeler riders not wearing helmets, driving in the wrong-lanes… People dropping children off to school skip proper turns and take the wrong lane just to avoid an extra 10 metres and a few more seconds,” she said.
The police commissioner stressed that the citizens especially children do a “cost analysis” of their lives vis-à-vis “10 seconds” when disobeying road traffic rules and putting lives in danger. She called on each child to ask their parents to become traffic rule-compliant and said if people take up their responsibilities, the need for police deployment on the road would stop.
DM Verma called deaths in road accidents “very unfortunate” and lamented the loss of a large number of lives in the country every year. He called on people to take of small things like wearing seat belts and helmets during rides to prevent loss of lives in road crashes.
“Children can be a good messenger for road safety. We have also planned a campaign to reach out to children in every school in taking this traffic awareness message to a wider audience. Our transport department will be talking to children in schools,” he said.
The DM underlined that road crash deaths are “not merely a data” but a “tragedy” for the families impacted by it, and added that the state government is committed to preventing accidents.
DCP (Traffic) Anil Yadav said the police department’s focus would be on strict enforcement of road rules while also making citizens aware of them. He also highlighted that the number of challans for violations of road rules across Noida and Greater Noida has more than doubled in 2023 from the last year.