Bhubaneswar: Five deaths in three days later, the traffic wing of Odisha police has reportedly identified five accident black spots on NH 16, passing through the twin cities of Bhubaneswar and Cuttack.
They are Batabhuasuni, Aiginia, the road in front of Hotel Crown, Acharya Vihar and Pahala.
On Monday, Police Commissioner Satyajit Mohanty had directed traffic cops to identify accident-prone areas and put up speed-breakers on the National Highway (NH), passing through Cuttack-Bhubaneswar, to prevent such fatalities. While two students were knocked down by a speeding truck on Nayapalli overbridge on May 25, a man riding a scooter met the same fate on May 27.
Besides these five black spots, efforts are on to identify more such areas witnessing accidents at regular intervals, police sources said.
In November last year, State Transport Minister Nrusingha Charan Sahu told the Odisha Assembly that 43,000 people had lost their lives in road accidents in the past one decade (between 2008 and 2018) while the average annual road accident deaths crossed 4,000 after 2013.
There has been a rise in accident fatalities since the past three years, the statistics furnished by the minister said.