[sustran] Fwd: analysis of the proposed Road Transport & Safety Bill 2014

[Muralidhar Rao]

Dear friends

On September 13, 2014, the Ministry of Road Transport & Highways,
Government of India (MoRTH), published a draft of the proposed *Road
Transport & Safety Bill 2014*. It is a long piece of legislation by Indian
standards - about 305 pages - and appears to try and cover anything and
everything connected to road transport in one, giant, omnibus legislation.

A team at our "praja.in", led by Dr Sanjay Vijayraghavan, PhD, has been
analysing the draft and putting in our comments, with a view to provide
feedback to the ministry, which presumably was the purpose of publishing
the draft on their site.* The MoRTH draft as well as the comments by PRAJA
members *(anybody who logs in is a member) *may be accessed here
<http://praja.in/en/blog/sanjayv/2014/09/16/draft-road-transport-and-safety-bill-2014>*.
The closing date has not been mentioned; we are presuming it is still open.

And, rather than compile all the feedback into one one omnibus note, we
have invited the ministry officials to actively participate in the
discussions to help fine-tune the overall outcome. Though, we have not seen
any comments from them so far, we would like to believe that they are
actively looking into the comments.

We believe this is the best way to help evolve a more comprehensive and
satisfactory output, through a participative process, and if we can get the
MoRTH officials to get involved, it could become a model for such
engagements in future. *We invite you all, as also whoever is interested,
to join in too, and make your contributions.*

Regards, Muralidhar Rao, President, Praja-RAAG

*PS:* *Praja-RAAG* (RAAG standing for "research, analysis, advocacy group")
is a registered society formed of active bloggers on "praja.in" (Praja, for
short). Praja is an e-platform of over 8,000 (regd) citizens, largely
'techies' of Bangalore, engaged in informed debates over various civic
issues, with a view to figuring out solutions for them. Where possible,
some of these solutions are then pursued on ground through Praja-RAAG. We
call PRAJA a virtual hall for debates.