Capital punishment: Road rage incidents on the rise

The city is on a short fuse as just a brush on the vehicle can take someone's life. With the increase in vehicular population and shrinking traffic space, the capital is witnessing a rise in road rage incidents wherein victims were even brutally murdered. The bullet shots have woken up lawmakers.

A Parliamentary panel has recommended that fire-arm licences should be so restricted that they should not be carried while travelling in personal vehicles in metropolitan cities and urban areas.

The Parliamentary Standing Committee on Tourism, Transport and Culture, headed by Mukul Roy MP, pointed out that road rage is one of the daily phenomena in metropolitan cities and urban areas.

In the capital, a brutal road rage takes place every five days. A total of 75 cases were reported in 2016 and 71 in 2015. In 2016, East Delhi saw the maximum such cases. From East Delhi, 20 cases were reported and 16 in South Delhi. The police have registered 14 cases of road rage in West Delhi. In 2015, 20 cases were reported from West Delhi and 14 from East Delhi. From South Delhi, 10 were registered.

"There are hundreds of cases which goes unreported or are just police complaints, with victims refusing to pursue them," a senior police officer said. Such incidents have become frequent across all metropolitan cities with the local police facing it tough to deal with.

Reasons for road rage

The officer explained that the Delhi's vehicular population has increased from 2.5 lakh in 2005 to 1 crore in 2016. Over 2.5 lakh vehicles were registered in Delhi in 2004 and 60 lakh in 2011. In six years, this number has increased tremendously.

Further, around 6 lakh vehicles enter Delhi from neighbouring states and cities. While the vehicular population has increased, the road length remains 33,198 km, said the officer.

According to Delhi police data, 2,42,250 drivers were booked for not stopping at a "stop line" in 2016, compared to 1,43,727 in 2015. They also booked 2,621 drivers for overtaking in 2016 as against 6,363 in 2015. However, challans against drink-driving showed a marginal increase from 25,958 in 2015 to 28,006 in 2016. Officers said that they had booked almost twice the number of people for driving without a licence last year, compared to 2015. The police sent 1,78,578 licences for suspension for various violations, the highest among all states.

The officer explained that close to 1 crore vehicles ply on Delhi roads. On an average, office-goers spend around three hours everyday on city roads.

A few cases

Last year, on December 5, a 25-year-old Haryana businessman was shot dead by an SUV driver after their vehicles sideswiped in east Delhi. Deepak Bhadana (25), who ran a cattle-feed business and owned a farm land in Faridabad, was shot at point blank in Dallupura village near New Ashok Nagar as his horrified relatives watched.

Similarly, on December 2, 2016, a 35-year-old vegetable vendor was killed and a shopkeeper injured after two men fired bullets at them after the shopkeeper's scooter brushed past the two who were standing nearby in Southwest Delhi's Najafgarh.