“Products and technologies showcased can help enforcement substantially”

All enforcement related issues should be dealt by the transport and police department. These issues should be dealt with in a more coherent manner.

The World Bank has been doing a lot of work in behavioural issues regarding Road Safety. We too have been doing a lot of work on behavioural safety, in trying to affect the behavior of the driver in one way or other. Time has come that we take a more conscious look at what these initiatives mean and how we can implement them in our country.

For rural roads, the Pradhan Mantri Gramin Sadak Yojana (PMGSY) has a reasonably popular app, ‘meri sadak’, but we do not have something of similar kind for the highway sector. I urge technology providers to work in this direction. The problem that arises for building an app for highways is that we have a large number of concessionaires. How do we reach these concessionaires? How do we play across the highways? We want to make an app on an All India level which could be accessed from anywhere in India. For instance, a technological issue will arise if a person is driving from Delhi to Nashik and there are five different concessionaires and ten different highways! What do we do then? We will be glad to receive solutions in these areas.

On the ‘Look East, Act East’ policy, we are planning to set up international check-posts with Bangladesh, Nepal, Bhutan, Myanmar and Thailand. This will involve much use of technology and a lot of understanding on the processes of clearances, customs, phytochemical clearances, and quarantine clearances. And then, we will need to find ways to build these clearances with seamless travel of a vehicle between countries. The Land Ports Authority of India, an organisation under the Ministry of Home Affairs, Government of India, is developing these international check-posts. It is the ministry’s job to provide top-class road connectivity to the nearest National Highways and then to ensure that our motor vehicle regulation does not impinge on the efficacies or well-being of these check-posts. This is another sector where we are expecting a lot of activity in the coming years.

The average speed of the trucks is 35km/hr and the waiting time of the vehicle at the check-post could be anywhere between three and five years. It takes longer time to travel within India than outside the country. These aspects add to the logistics cost. If we have to reap the benefits of GST fully, we will have to get rid of the inter-state impediments at the earliest.

We want our technology providers and stakeholders to come forward with innovative and cost-effective solutions. One simplistic and technology-driven way to do that is by co-locating the check-post in one building. We do not want to inspect every vehicle. Instead, there could be an algorithm which could test a particular vehicle, read particular history — driving licenses and its RCs, and thereby, reduce the waiting time at the check-post substantially.

Vidyottama Sharma