Officials pull out statistics to prove that the Ambedkar Nagar-Oberoi Hotel stretch has claimed 101 lives in six years. It was always a killer road and the BRT has nothing to do with it, they clarify
In an amazing revelation, the Delhi Government yesterday said a total of 101 people were killed in accidents on the 7 km long Ambedkar Nagar-Oberoi Hotel stretch over a period of six years.
In 2003 alone, as many as 32 fatal accidents took place on the stretch, which is part of the Bus Rapid Transit (BRT) project currently under construction. The entire BRT corridor is 14.5 km long and Oberoi Hotel is nearly half way on this route.
Killer corridor
“The road was a killer corridor even before the construction of the BRT started and the recent accidents are not being caused by the ongoing project,” official sources, under fire for the frequent fatalities on the Ambedkar Nagar-Delhi Gate stretch, asserted yesterday.
Rolling out annual statistics of the fatal accidents on this road from 2001 till now as proof, the sources said the lowest number of fatalities was reported in 2007, the year when work on the BRT got started.
Facts & figures
While 32 people , most of them pedestrians, were killed in 2003, 17 lives each were lost on the killer corridor in 2002 and 2004. In 2006, 15 people were killed on the same road while 10 each were crushed under the wheels of speeding vehicles in 2001 and 2005.
The officials contended that the least number of fatalities were reported in 2007, when three persons were killed. In the current year, only one person has died on the stretch.
According to sources, highly placed officials approached the police for statistics of the fatal accidents along the BRT route after the Delhi government came under severe criticism for the fatalities along the stretch. The officials wanted to see just how many fatal accidents had been taking place on the stretch before the BRT work started.
Washing hands off
“We were confident that the BRT had nothing to do with the accidents. We were proved right because the data collected by the Delhi police showed that there were an extraordinarily high number of fatalities along the route before the BRT work started last year,” the officials said. They said in a sharp contrast to the perception being built on the issue, the number of fatalities was the least ever since the BRT started.
The other side
“Although each life is precious, but only four fatal accidents have taken place after the BRT corridor work got started in 2007,” said a source.
The officer also claimed that although the victims in the past were poor man and women the recent accidents involved bikers and the well off people.
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