A background note can be accessed here: MoRTH Road Accidents Report 2024: Highways, Over-Speeding and Young Adults
The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) report shows that national and state highways account for a disproportionately large share of road fatalities despite constituting a relatively small share of the road network. How should policymakers interpret this relationship between infrastructure expansion and road safety outcomes?
Our National and State Highways are designed to facilitate high-speed travel. It should therefore come as no surprise that they account for a disproportionately large share of road traffic fatalities, given the exponential relationship between speed and crash severity. A doubling of speed, for instance, results in a four-fold increase in crash energy because kinetic energy increases with the square of speed. If the energy dissipated during a high-speed crash exceeds what the human body can withstand, death becomes inevitable.
It is imperative for policymakers in India to do more than pay lip service to road safety and internalise a key principle of the Safe System approach: road design must account for human frailty. We need to move beyond highway performance measures such as lane kilometres, capacity, and level of service, which prioritise mobility while giving insufficient weight to safety. Highway projects should be evaluated not only by how efficiently they move vehicles, but also by how effectively they manage crash energy. This requires appropriate speed limits, forgiving roadsides, median barriers, access control, safe pedestrian crossings, and, where high speeds are unavoidable, segregation of vulnerable road users to prevent avoidable deaths.
The report continues to identify over-speeding as the dominant contributor to road fatalities across India. To what extent does the persistence of this trend reflect limitations in enforcement architecture rather than individual behaviour alone?
The core tenet of both Vision Zero and the Safe System approach is that making a mistake should not be fatal. The allocation of responsibilities under Vision Zero provides a useful framework for understanding how India should approach reducing road traffic fatalities. System designers are ultimately responsible for the design, operation, and use of the road transport system and, therefore, for the level of safety within it. Road users are responsible for following the rules established by the system designers. If road users fail to obey these rules due to a lack of knowledge, acceptance, or ability, or if serious injuries still occur, the responsibility reverts to the system designers to take additional steps to prevent deaths and serious injuries.
This final responsibility is particularly significant because it ensures that road users are not held solely responsible for crashes. Instead, the focus shifts to system accountability. The Bengaluru–Mysuru Expressway is a compelling example. Following years of high crash rates after its conversion into an expressway, the authorities improved the infrastructure and, more importantly, introduced average-speed (distance-based) enforcement. The results were remarkable: road fatalities declined from 188 in 2023 to 56 in 2024 and remained at 57 in 2025, demonstrating the effectiveness of safer infrastructure and consistent enforcement relative to individual behaviours.
The report finds that a substantial share of road accident deaths occur among individuals in the 18–45 age group, representing the most economically productive segment of the population. How should India incorporate the long-term economic and human capital costs of road fatalities into transport policymaking?
First and foremost, road safety is a development challenge and should not be viewed solely as a transport-sector issue. Road traffic injuries cost India an estimated 1.3 to 5 percent of its GDP annually, with the MoRTH estimating the burden at around 3 percent. Since many fatalities occur among people aged 18–45 years, the country’s most economically productive population, the economic and human capital losses are immense. Every fatality represents not only the loss of a life, but also years of lost productivity and economic contribution.
Incorporating these long-term costs into public investment priorities requires a structural change in the way transport investments are planned and evaluated. Today, investment decisions are driven largely by politicians and bureaucrats rather than by technocrats. Data, transport modelling, and evidence-based decision-making need to become central to the investment process, with reduced non-technical influence over project selection. India should develop project appraisal tools that evaluate infrastructure through benefit–cost analyses that explicitly incorporate productivity losses, healthcare costs, social welfare impacts, environmental costs, and other long-term societal costs and benefits. These efforts should be supported by regular data collection, robust analytical tools, and strategic planning with a 15- to 30-year horizon. Policies should emerge from a transparent investment framework that treats equity, gender, climate resilience, safety, and other relevant Sustainable Development Goals as fundamental objectives of transport planning.