KARACHI, April 8: At a time when the World Health Organization is observing the World Health Day this year with a theme of "Road safety is no accident", the city government has failed to launch a comprehensive and integrated road safety campaign in Karachi.

The growing trend in road accidents in the metropolis depicts lack of road safety education among people as daily two citizens perish in road accidents. A road safety campaign was designed some years back by traffic bureau of the defunct KDA, and was launched in some parts of the city.

However, after the inception of city government in 2001, the road safety programme could not gain much attention in the eyes of city higher ups and lying in cold storage for more than two years.

The transport and communication department was established in the city government under devolution plan to handle urban transport matter, of which road safety is an essential component.

The road safety section of transport and communication department submitted some proposals and did some initial work to launch road safety campaign in Karachi and requested higher ups to print posters for creating awareness among people particularly students.

However, it had to wait over one year to get printed posters inscribing with road safety slogans. When the posters got printed, their quality was so poor as even it was hard to read the road safety message properly and to comprehend it.

These posters were later distributed among students of several schools in city, but, no positive response received from schools as quality of posters made the whole practice futile. A city government official, when contacted, cited a number of reasons for failure to launch a road safety campaign at a large scale.

"Meagre allocation for road safety campaign, uncooperative attitude of public sector media institutions, lack of road safety experts and apathy of city higher ups are the main hurdles in this regard," he said. The official said that only Rs0.3 million had been earmarked in this year's budget, which were insufficient to launch a campaign in a mega city like Karachi.

He said that a television programme was produced for road safety education and it was approved in the General Manager's Conference of Pakistan Television (PTV) in 2003. However, the programme has not been aired so far, as the authorities seemed least concerned to address this vital issue of the city.

Recently, he added, some schools located at University Road were selected for road safety education to create awareness among school students. "The much emphasis should be on school-going children as they are the worst victims of road related accidents," he said. - PPI