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 markings.
The highways and road ministry primarily holds contractors and consultants responsible for any deficiency in design, construction, or maintenance of the roads as per settled safety standards. This overlooks the possibility that inadequate design specifications by government agencies might be contributing to flawed construction.
In any case, the penalty of Rs 1 lakh in the 2019 amendment of the Road Safety Act for non-compliance with these standards is too low to be effective, given that the cost of road projects exceeds Rs 15 crore per km on average.
The 2007 Sundar Committee on Road Safety has recommended separating the entities responsible for setting safety standards and those assessing compliance. In India, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the National Highways Authority of India do both. Legislative loopholes enable design failures to slip through the cracks because there are no independent audits.
These factors combined make Indian roads among the most deadly and unsafe in the world. But there are some obvious solutions that could go a long way in reducing the risk to drivers, passengers as well as pedestrians – identifying problem areas, bad road design and rectifying them.
What makes roads unsafe
National highways and expressways comprise 2% of the total length of roads in India but account for 36% of deaths. Studies of highways find that road crashes are determined by design features. These include the super elevation, which is the raised outer edge of a curved road, the degree of the curve, or the “bend”, and the shoulder width, which is the recovery area on the outer edges for drivers to regain control or pull over in emergencies.
Drivers also make fewer errors when the design is consistent. In India, there have been fatal instances of how this affects road safety.
In September 2022, Tata Group Chairman Cyrus Mistry had died in a car crash on the Mumbai-Ahmedabad highway. A forensic team said that a bridge parapet wall protruding into the shoulder lane on the highway could have been a contributing factor.
In Tamil Nadu, research found that the East Coast Road, which runs from Chennai to Cuddalore, reported many accidents due to the lack of uniform lane widths, varying shoulder widths and uneven median openings on different stretches.
Research on the four-lane intercity highway between Thoppur and Krishnagiri in Tamil Nadu had found that keeping a highway’s horizontal curvature at a minimum can maintain safe operating speed and increase safety.
Despite the recommendations of the Indian Roads Congress, most national highways do not have speed change lanes. Speed change lanes enable drivers to slow down or speed up before exiting a highway or merging with the main highway traffic.
Such acceleration or deceleration stretches help reduce rear-end collisions, especially in traffic consisting, among others, of buses and trucks that accelerate slower than cars but do not slow down fast enough due to momentum and low fuel-burn once they are travelling at high speed. Buses and trucks are involved in 70% of fatal crashes in urban as well as rural India.
Bad engineering and unscientific design also create “black spots” where traffic collisions are concentrated. In 2021, experts counted about 6,000 black spots on India’s national highways.
Vulnerable road users
The burden of injuries and fatalities among vulnerable road users is extremely high in India: 23% of the victims in India were pedestrians and cyclists, according to the 2023 report by the Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Centre. Adding motorcyclists to the mix, the percentage of victims increases to 87%.
Walking or cycling on Indian roads is an ordeal. Geetam Tiwari, an expert on road safety in India, has said that road infrastucture heavily favours motorised vehicles over non-motorised transport. Pedestrians are relegated to the periphery of road networks or forced to compete for space with motor vehicles, which puts them at grave risk of injuries or fatalities.
Accidents involving vulnerable users are caused by slow and fast-moving vehicles being mixed on the street, inadequate crossing facilities and poor visibility coupled with pedestrian behaviour like jaywalking.
The World Resources Institute finds that pedestrian crossings, foot overbridges and vehicle-restricted zones can significantly improve pedestrian safety. But in India, these measures are often absent or not applied properly.
Finally, the probability of pedestrian death is estimated at less than 10% at impact speeds of 30 kmph and more than 80% at 50 kmph. If overspeeding cannot be controlled by appealing rationally to the driver, there should instead be nudges with subconscious appeal.
A study by the French business school INSEAD compared three types of performance nudges to drivers, indicating how they performed on the current trip compared to their personal best, personal average and latest driving performance.
Personal best and personal average nudges improved driving performance, on average, by about 18% each. The performance was scored on maintaining smooth, controlled motion by keeping a safe distance, avoiding jerky manoeuvres and staying within their lane and speed limits.
Ray of hope
Redesigning roads scientifically yields desirable results instead of leaving road safety to fate. The nonprofit Save Life Foundation’s Road Safety Good Practices in India report details projects such as the Belgaum Yaragatti Highway’s Safe Corridor Demonstration Project that saw a 54% reduction in deaths between 2015 and 2018. Safety measures that were implemented included raised pavement markers, rumble strips and prominent pedestrian facilities.
Similarly, the Delhi Gate Junction, which used to be a crash spot, was redesigned as part of a trial with the help of the World Resources Institute and the Global Designing Cities Initiative. Around 2,500 square metres of refuge islands – raised areas in the middle of a road that pedestrians can walk to for safety while crossing a busy street – were reclaimed. It led to a 70% reduction in conflict area and a 33% reduction in pedestrian crossing distance.
Reducing road injuries and deaths in India through safer designs will be a long, arduous journey. But there it is worth keeping in mind the saying that it is better to lose a minute in life than life in a minute.
Manoshij Banerjee is an independent consultant on digital behaviour and culture.
Mohammed Shahid Abdulla is a faculty member in Information Systems, IIM Kozhikode.
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