As part of its special drive against drunk motorists on the last night of the year, the Mumbai traffic police has arrested around 703 motorists within a span of just nine hours in Mumbai and the suburbs for allegedly driving drunk. Only a couple of them were women. In 2012, around 840 motorists were caught for drunk driving, after which the statistics for the last day of the year had come down in 2013 and 2014.
The worrying factor is that people have not been deterred from driving drunk and it continues to thrive, as the Mumbai traffic police arrested as many as 18,035 motorists including 21 repeat offenders and 36 women for driving under the influence of alcohol in 2015 while in 2014 around 15,541 motorists were arrested for the same. The majority of the motorists are bikers.
The Asian Age had reported, in October, how the number of drunk driving fatal accidents have more than doubled in 2015 with at least 12 persons being killed in 12 accidents while in 2014 four were killed in four accidents.
The special drive was conducted between 9 pm on Thursday till 6 am on Friday. Joint commissioner of police, traffic, Milind Bharambe said, -"We had 90 nakabandi points. Apart from them, we had laid more points along with local police. Out of the 703, about 211 were caught in north Mumbai and 204 in Eastern Mumbai. Another 161 were caught in west Mumbai and Central and South Mumbai were at the bottom with 59 and 70 cases respectively.-"
Another cause fo concern is that the majority of those violating the law are youngsters. Out of those held for drunk driving throughout the year, around 486 people were in the 18 to 20 years age group, 4,517 were in the 21 to 25 age group and 5,004 were in the 26 to 30 age group. Firm Action Transport minister Diwakar Raote said, “The offender’s driving licences will be suspended for three months if they are found to be indulging in rash driving and overspeeding, jumping traffic signals, overloading of goods vehicles, carrying passengers in goods vehicles, driving vehicles after consuming alcohol and narcotics and speaking on mobile phones while driving.” Mr Raote said wearing a helmet while driving shall be made mandatory all over the state. Errant drivers will have to attend two-hour counselling sessions. Stating that his endeavour would be to bring the incidents of drunken driving and traffic violations down to three digits, he said that in Mumbai alone the incidents of drunken driving and violations of traffic rules has been on the higher side since 2011.
