Haryana launches IIT Madras’ Sanjaya app to reduce road mishaps, help police, emergency aid to plan measures

Hyderabad: Indian Institute of Technology Madras’ (IIT Madras) Centre of Excellence for Road Safety (CoERS) launched a new location intelligence platform called ‘Sanjaya’ in Haryana on Thursday.

The platform is aimed at helping road-owning agencies, law enforcement, emergency care providers and other road safety stakeholders to visualise the high-frequency accident zone data for planning targeted interventions in Haryana.

Sanjaya can be used to visualise crash black spots, and emerging black spots for stakeholders to determine what type of interventions are needed and where they are needed. In addition, tools to perform kilometre analysis, corridor analysis, cluster analysis and point radius analysis with visualisations such as heatmaps/trend patterns are included in the platform.

“Sanjaya is an important tool designed to provide nuanced insights and targeted strategies towards making roads safer. We will also direct our attention to the regions that are witnessing higher crash rates and Sanjaya will help find out those critical hotspots,” said Sanjeev Kaushal IAS, chief secretary, Government of Haryana at its launch.

Crash data

India currently has the highest number of road crashes and fatalities in the world. Crash data from 2022 published by the Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) attributes that nearly 60 per cent of fatalities took place on 5 per cent of the roads (National and State Highways) in India.

The working age group of 18 to 60 accounts for 83.4 per cent of total road crash fatalities in the country, which has serious implications on the emotional and psychological impact on families and society at large and imposes significant socioeconomic costs on the nation.

Key features

- Map-based analyses of blackspots and emerging blackspots across the country, sorted by jurisdiction of states, districts and police boundaries.

- Infographic and visual displays of data to enable a better understanding of crash patterns in a desired region.

Explaining the workings of the platform, Professor Venkatesh Balasubramanian, Head, CoERS and RBG Labs, Department of Engineering Design, IIT Madras, who is coordinating this initiative, said, “Planning target-specific interventions to mitigate road traffic accidents is important to reduce road accident fatalities. Any intervention must be based on data so that we not only identify the problems on the road but also implement changes that are viable in the long term.

Sanjaya is a platform to get actionable intelligence for jurisdictional leaders. This will empower stakeholders across Haryana to visualize district-wise high-frequency accident zones and aid in preparing an action plan for targeted rectification.”