Indians call for better road-safety standards

Earlier this month, Cyrus Mistry, the former chairman of the Tata Group, one of India's largest industrial conglomerates, was killed in a road accident after his Mercedes hit a road divider on a highway north of Mumbai.

Mistry and a passenger who was also killed were not wearing seat belts in the back seat of the vehicle.

The government responded immediately by announcing new rules requiring back-seat passengers to buckle up.

A road safety investigation at the accident site carried out by a team of independent experts flagged concerns over poor road maintenance, inadequate signage and missing road markings.

Soon after the accident, India's minister of road transport and highways, Nitin Gadkari, told the Hindustan Times newspaper that more needs to be done for safety as India modernizes its highway network.

"The focus should be on creating infrastructure that is safe and accessible for all. The speed limits are very arbitrary and often are not set with a scientific approach. The plan is to set speed limits for all these categories of roads in consultation with states," said Gadkari.

According to the Transport Ministry, India's government has set a target to cut the number of road accidents and deaths in half by 2024.

Lack of road safety standards

Mistry's deadly accident came after a report from India's National Crime Records Bureau was released showing over 155,000 people died in accidents on the nation's roads in 2021.

In the last decade, over 3 million people in India were killed in road accidents, according to government figures. On average, around 500,000 accidents happen annually, with 150,000 fatalities.

According to the World Bank, which in June 2022 approved a $250 million (€261 million) road safety package for India, the South Asian country accounts for almost 10% of all crash-related deaths globally, despite only having 1% of the world's vehicles.

Prince Singhal, founder of the Indian non-profit Community Against Drunken Driving, told DW that the government focuses more on building roads and less on increasing road safety.

Singhal said India needs to set up better enforcement education and engineering as more Indians take to the road.

As of 2019, there are over 295 million cars on the road in India, up from 272 million in 2018, according to Transport Ministry data.

India aims at modernizing road safety

The Indian Road Safety Campaign (IRSC), a non-profit road safety group, says that more crash data needs to be collected in order to understand the different causes of accidents.

"This data would then help government take action and make policies. We cannot solely bank on police data for estimating deaths in road accidents and ignore other critical sources," Deepanshu Gupta, co-founder of IRSC, told DW.

Better data collection in cooperation with the Health and Home Ministries would lead to better emergency response and accident prevention strategies, he added.

"Until that is done, India will continue to top the chart when it comes to road traffic deaths globally," said Gupta.

A detailed analysis by IndiaSpend, a data journalism initiative, showed many road accidents could be avoided if state and central governments improve city planning, train drivers better, and enforce traffic laws properly.

"The two most frequent causes of road deaths are speeding and drunk driving, followed by a lack of lane discipline (driving on the wrong side), jumping the red light and the use of a mobile phone while driving," the study said.

To allow data on road accidents to be more robust, the government introduced the 2019 Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, which aims to empower officials to investigate road crashes for improved and more comprehensive data.

Simultaneously, the government has also launched the Integrated Road Accident Database (iRAD) project, a central accident database management system, that connects information from multiple sources including hospitals, ambulance services, blood banks and insurance companies.

India's government has set a target to cut the number of road accidents and deaths in half by 2024 and is working with the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank on projects, including a $3.1 billion investment to refit stretches of road where accidents frequently happen.

Edited by: Wesley Rahn