Highways safety push: Govt to fine contractors for repeat NH accidents; cashless treatment scheme for victims soon

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways will now impose penalties on contractors if more than one accident occurs in a year on a specific stretch of National Highway built under the build-operate-transfer (BOT) model, a senior official said.Road Transport and Highways Secretary V Umashankar said the ministry has revised the BOT document to make contractors responsible for crash management and corrective measures, PTI reported.“If more than one accident happens on a particular stretch, say 500 metres, then the contractor will face a penalty of Rs 25 lakh. The penalty will increase to Rs 50 lakh if an accident happens next year,” Umashankar said.He added that the highways ministry has identified around 3,500 accident-prone areas across India.National Highways projects are mainly executed under three modes — BOT, hybrid annuity model (HAM), and engineering procurement and construction (EPC). The concession period for BOT projects, including maintenance, ranges from 15 to 20 years, while for HAM projects it is 15 years.For EPC projects, the defect liability period is five years for bituminous pavements and ten years for concrete pavements. Toll-operate-transfer (TOT) and InvIT projects have concession periods of 20 to 30 years, while operate-maintain-transfer (OMT) projects generally run for nine years.Umashankar also said the government will soon launch a nationwide cashless treatment scheme for road accident victims after refining the pilot model with technical and operational learnings.Under the scheme, accident victims will be entitled to cashless treatment of up to Rs 1.5 lakh for the first seven days at designated hospitals, according to a May notification by the ministry.The initiative is aimed at reducing road accident fatalities caused by delays in medical response. A pilot for the cashless scheme was launched in Chandigarh on March 14, 2024, and later expanded to six states.