Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday held a meeting with the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) to discuss issues ranging over safety on the 94-km-long Mumbai Pune Expresswa
Chief minister Devendra Fadnavis on Tuesday held a meeting with the Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) to discuss issues ranging over safety on the 94-km-long Mumbai Pune Expressway after the Sunday accident in which 17 lives were lost.
MSRDC officials along with IRB Infrastructure Development (the toll-collecting agency on the E-way) and state highway police officials attended the meeting.
A senior MSRDC official who attended the meeting, said, “CM has asked the state highway police officials to increase patrolling on the E-way in order to spread awareness to follow safe driving rules on the stretch. The chief minister also directed the MSRDC officials to speedily take up the initiatives of installing CCTV camera on the Expressway and implement all the measures being taken to make the E-way a safe road for driving.”
The accident in which 17 people died took place early on Sunday near a village named Shedung located near Navi Mumbai towards the Mumbai side of the Expressway corridor. Around 5.30 am, a Maruti Swift Dzire halted in the first lane to address a punctured tyre. An Innova car passing by stopped to help the driver of the Swift when after a few minutes both the vehicles were hit by a speeding private bus. The bus then swerved and fell into 20-foot ditch, taking down the Innova with it.
The MSRDC has been planning to make the E-way a ‘zero fatality zone’ in the next four years and one of the priorities for it is also to have a trauma care centre, which has remained on paper since 2012.
“Not much can be done by the enforcing authorities when accidents like that of Sunday take place. The accident was a perfect example of human error as no vehicle is expected to halt on the first lane of the E-way without putting parking lights on,” said an MSRDC officer.
