Even during Traffic Awareness Week some police drivers attached with bureaucrats and MLAs were found driving official vehicles recklessly while talking on their cell phones on the congested roads of the city.
“While there have been ample instances of persons indulging in rash driving getting convicted under law and awarded imprisonment of two years and more, but it seems these police drivers are above the law,” said Akhilesh Sharma, whose car luckily missed a collision on a turn with one such rashly driven police vehicle on a foggy Tuesday morning in Gandhi Nagar. Sharma was on his way to drop his two children to their school.
Though he hurled abuses at the erring police driver, who was driving a white police Gypsy, being an old man Sharma couldn’t chase and catch him.
“See what this monster had been up to. They don’t bother if someone is hit and dies because of them,” he said, adding that they had become a law unto themselves.
Alia, a Jammu University student, said some of the police drivers deliberately drive rashly and cause panic among girls like her who ride Scootys to reach their colleges, schools and workplaces.
However, SSP, Traffic, Mohan Lal said traffic rules were same for everyone. “No one is above law. The police are supposed to implement law and if this thing is being done by some of the police drivers, we will definitely look into it and the guilty will be penalised,” said Lal.
More people have died in road accidents than in Pak-sponsored terrorism in the past 25 years. In Jammu and Kashmir, 63.5 per cent of the total unnatural deaths had been caused by road accidents compared to the all-India figure of 36.4 per cent.
Nearly 1,000 persons have been losing their lives in road mishaps each year and the number of victims getting maimed is much larger.
Documents from 2009 to 2011 stated that 18,786 road accidents had been reported in the state, in which 3,288 persons had been killed and 27,165 injured.
The number of road accidents was 6,700 in 2012. The figure was 6,457 in 2013. The number of deaths was 992 last year at an average of 19 per week.
Reckless police drivers on ‘VIP duty’ danger on roads
