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The Maharashtra State Road Development Corporation (MSRDC) is in discussions with IIT Bombay to conduct a course on road safety for government engineers against the backdrop of the rising number of highway accidents. Kiran Kurundkar, Joint Managing Director, MSRDC, said that road safety was not given much importance in engineering curricula. The subject of road safety finds a very small space in the curriculum of engineers. It is not given much importance.

IIT Bombay felt it could bridge this gap and offered to conduct a certificate course on road safety to train government engineers. We are yet to decide the details, said Kurundkar. Transport activists welcomed the move.

Commenting on the lack of safety education among civil engineers, transport expert Ashok Datar said, When a road is designed there isn’t much consideration for safety and it is more about speed. There needs to be more emphasis on road safety.

The MSRDC, being a road construction body, needs to be more conscious about road safety at the construction stage itself. The awareness level of road safety is so bad that whatever one does about it is good, Datar added.

A study on the vehicular traffic and accident-prone zones on the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, a highway maintained by the MSRDC, has revealed that from 2002 to 2014, the 94-km stretch has seen over 14,500 accidents and at least 1,400 deaths.