ARTICLE | Sustainable Mobility
Public transport interventions at core of achieving SDGs
Transportation systems have been so imbibed in our lives, especially the urban areas, that it is now a parameter of measuring growth and development of a country or a city. In the endeavour of providing the user with better facilities, professionals have been quite successful, but there is another side of the coin as well. Road users have suffered losses due to transportation and its facilities
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ccording to the World Health Organization, the leading cause of death due to ‘injuries’ is ‘road injury’, and 1.3 million people die each year across the globe due to it. 90 per cent of the world’s fatalities are recorded in low- and middle-income countries. The picture is gloomier for Asian countries as out of these total accidents, 60 per cent are reported in Asia. According to reports by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Government of India, about 1,50,785 people have been killed and 4,94,624 people injured in 2018 due to road-related incidents. In order to get an idea of what India is losing every year, we can glance at the following analogy.
34 September 2021 | www.urbanupdate.in
In India, in the recent past, we have lost about 1.5 lakh people annually due to road accident deaths. The population of small cities like Darjeeling (1,20,414), Roorkee (1,18,118), and Greater Noida (1,07,676) is less than the number of accidents. In a nutshell, we can say “India loses one city every year”. In order to tackle the situation, the United Nations has incorporated precautionary measures and targets in the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). These targets cannot be achieved until and unless there is coordination among and within stakeholder organizations right from local level bodies to international organisations. The targets can only be achieved when we start acting more efficiently at the local level and start
thinking about the outputs at the international level. SDG 3.6 (Ensuring healthy lives and well-being) spells out the target of halving deaths due to road accidents by the year 2020. Unfortunately, according to researches by both WHO and the World Resources Institute (WRI), this target has not yet been achieved.
How to localise transportrelated SDGs
In India, nearly 30 per cent of the population lives in small cities, with population of less than one million, and these cities often have a poor database. All national-level reports related to traffic deaths include data for large cities only. The master plans/ city development plans in these cities
