Union minister Nitin Gadkari on September 6 highlighted the importance of seatbelts in a car and said that it would be mandatory for all the passengers in a car to wear them.
Sharing a video from an event, the Union minister said that seatbelts will be mandated. “It will now be mandatory for all the people sitting in the car to wear a seat belt,” tweeted Union minister Nitin Gadkari.
In the video, minister Nitin Gadkari also highlighted that the safety beeps will now be present for rare seats along with the front seats which will buzz if one doesn’t put on a seat belt.
Nitin Gadkari’s remarks came after well-known industrialist and former Tata Sons chairman Cyrus Mistry died in a road accident near Mumbai on September 4 evening. Reports of him not wearing the rare seat belt soon made rounds after the accident.
According to Palghar Police, Cyrus Mistry was travelling from Ahmedabad to Mumbai when his car hit the divider. There were four people in the car. Two died on the spot, including Mistry, while the other two were shifted to hospital. Police said that both the deceased were seated in the rear seats.
Earlier in the day, police asked the car manufacturer company why the airbags in the ill-fated SUV did not open at the time of the accident.
Palghar Police asked several questions from the car manufacturer company, including: “Why do not the airbags open? Was there any mechanical fault in the vehicle? What was the brake fluid of the car? What was the tire pressure?”
Police said that these vehicles come out of the plant only after proper testing. “In such a situation, what is the report of the collision impact on the manufacturer’s investigation? Was the steering locked after the collision?” police asked the car manufacturer.
The car manufacturer team will submit the answers to all these questions in its report.
According to sources, the car manufacturer company has informed the Palghar police that the data recorder chip of the vehicle will be sent to Germany for decoding and after decoding from Germany, detailed information about the SUV will be made available to the police.
It may take several days in this process. In this data recorder, detailed information about the vehicle will be available. Information will be there like how the brake, airbag and other machinery were working. The speed of the car at the time of the accident will also be known.
The estimates about the speed of the vehicle are made on the basis of different video footage or time calculations. The average speed of the vehicle will be known but it is impossible to estimate the speed of the vehicle at different places at different times. Therefore, whatever the speed of the vehicle must have been at the time of the accident, the exact information will be revealed only after getting detailed information from the data recorder, police sources said.
Reports said Cyrus Mistry and others had left Udvada at 1:25 pm on September 4 and the accident happened around 2:28 pm. So, they covered a distance of about 60-65 kilometres in 1 hour and 2 minutes.
Police are verifying whether they had stopped somewhere during this journey or they were moving at a very high speed in the middle.
Apart from Mistry, another deceased has been identified as Jahangir Dinsha Pandole. The injured Anayata Pandole and Darius Pandole are currently undergoing treatment at a hospital.
The driver of the car in which Cyrus Mistry was travelling lost control due to over-speeding and rammed into the divider, said Palghar Police sources on September 4.
