DME accident: parents of victims accuse truck driver, authorities of loss

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Family members of the five victims of the Delhi-Meerut Highway (DME) incident said the driver of the truck was primarily responsible for the crash. They also blamed the authorities because the truck was driving on the wrong side of the highway.

The driver was driving the truck carelessly on the wrong side, and we lost five of our family. The driver is primarily responsible. But somehow the authorities are also responsible because they did not notice the traffic violation, said Pappu Kumar, brother of one of the victims, Sonu Kumar.

NHAI, distraught traffic cops

Mudit Garg, project manager of the National Highways Authority of India (NHAI), said on Tuesday that checking for traffic violations is the responsibility of the traffic police, and that they must take action against drivers taking the wrong side or accelerating vehicles … It could be possible that the driver made a U-turn halfway along the freeway to take the wrong side. We have 38 CCTV cameras along the highway (from phase 4 to Dasna to Meerut) and these are connected to our control room at the Kashi tollgate. We are going to check the CCTV footage to understand what really happened.

We provide traffic violation data to the Ghaziabad traffic police, but they have not been able to link to our systems, Garg said, adding that Phase 2 (of UP-Gate to Dasna) along the DME has 40 CCTV which are connected to the Dasna control room, but the link for data transfer has not yet been established between the NHAI and the traffic police systems from Ghaziabad.

Ramanand Kushwaha, Superintendent of Police (Traffic), said: “We checked the footage from four CCTV cameras, but were unable to spot the driver entering the highway from the wrong side … Investigation is underway, said Ramanand Kushwaha, superintendent of police (traffic).

Almost 99% of the work to link to the NHAI system is complete and it will be up and running in a few days. Once that is done, we will be able to issue challans to violators along the DME based on traffic data provided by the NHAI, Kushwaha said Tuesday evening.

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