On December 24, 2018 eight people, including seven from the same family, were killed in a highway pile-up due to thick fog in Jhajjar
,
Haryana. Five days later, on December 29, 2018, seven people were killed and four injured when a vehicle rammed into two SUVs due to heavy fog on the Ambala-Chandigarh national highway.
The above two incidents that happened just few days apart were hardly the lone ones. The previous winter, on January 7 2018, India also lost its
powerlifting
world champion Saksham
Yadav
in road crash on Delhi-Panipat Highway, partly due to dense fog.
Road fatalities on account of weather conditions like fog run in thousands every year. The bad news is that they are getting deadlier with every passing year. In 2016, as many as 9,317 people died in fog-related road crashes, the number increased to 11, 090 in 2017. This is a jump of almost 20% in one year alone. Worse, between 2014 and 2017, fatalities on roads due to fog-related crashes surged almost 100 per cent (in absolute terms).
STATES WITH THE MOST CASUALTIES North India, which is engulfed in thick fog every year in the months of December and January, sees the most number of road deaths. In 2017, UP topped the tally, with a record of over 3,000 deaths, followed by
Bihar, Haryana and Punjab.
FOG LIGHTS A SOLUTION Increased visibility between vehicles, according to worldwide research, reduces crash risk by more than 30 per cent. Considering this, global road safety body
International Road Federation
(IRF) urged the Indian government to make front and rear fog lights mandatory in all vehicles last year.
Fog lights give a clearer view of the road ahead as they aim their illumination beneath the area and can be added to any vehicle.
With fog-related road deaths accounting for a whopping 16 per cent of total road crashes in 2017, a law that makes both front and rear fog lights mandatory in vehicles, amongst other measures, is clearly the need of the hour.