India’s roads are deadly – design fixes could make them safer for everyone

Every day, 462 people in India die in road crashes – deaths that The Lancet describes as “a preventable health epidemic”. Despite record investments by the Indian government in road infrastructure, the country accounted for 22% of road crashes globally.

In 2022, nearly half a million Indians were injured in road crashes and more than 168,000 killed – a 9.4% jump from 2021. These crashes cost India 3%-5% of its gross domestic product a year.

Studies attribute most of these mishaps to human error. Overspeeding causes 71.2% of fatalities, while 5.4% are due to motorists driving on the wrong side of the road.

One reason why 80% or more of these cases are attributed to human factors is legal: motor vehicles laws disregard the possibility of crashes due to poor vehicles, roads or infrastructure design, says a 2023 report by Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre of the Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi.

The World Health Organization’s Road Safety Report 2023 states that countries, by and large, “build their mobility systems for motor vehicles, not for people, and not with safety as the main concern”.

Union Minister Nitin Gadkari, too, has often acknowledged that accidents and deaths on Indian roads are mainly due to faulty road engineering, defective detailed project reports and the bad design of junctions coupled with inadequate signage and road...

Read more