On Thursday, January 18, 2024, the Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) at the Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) launched a new location intelligence platform named ‘Sanjaya’ in Haryana. This platform is designed to assist road-owning agencies, law enforcement, emergency care providers, and other stakeholders for road safety. Its primary function is to visualize high-frequency accident zone data, enabling targeted interventions and planning in Haryana.
‘Sanjaya’ serves as an unique platform for stakeholders to observe crash black spots and potential emerging black spots. This enables them to determine the necessary interventions and their specific locations. The platform is also linked with kilometer analysis, corridor analysis, cluster analysis, and point radius analysis tools. Visualizations such as heatmaps and trend patterns are included to enhance the analytical capabilities of the platform.
Sanjeev Kaushal IAS, Chief Secretary of the Government of Haryana said that Sanjaya is a crucial tool designed to offer detailed insights and focused strategies for enhancing road safety. They will specifically address regions with higher crash rates, and Sanjaya will assist in identifying these critical hotspots.
THE STATISTICS of India presently holds the unfortunate distinction of having the highest number of road crashes and fatalities globally. According to crash data from 2022 published by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), nearly 60 percent of fatalities occurred on just 5 percent of the roads (National and State Highways) in India.
The age group between 18 and 60 constitutes 83.4 percent of the total road crash fatalities in the country, leading to significant emotional and psychological repercussions on families and society as a whole. Additionally, this imposes substantial socioeconomic costs on the nation.
Professor Venkatesh Balasubramanian, the Head of CoERS and RBG Labs at the Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, and the coordinator of this initiative, said that it is important to plan interventions that specifically target mitigating road traffic accidents in order to reduce fatalities. The intervention lies in its foundation on data, allowing them not only to identify road-related issues but also to implement sustainable changes over the long term.
