India records nearly five lakh road accidents every year, killing approximately 1.7 lakh people. And yet, somehow, this remains a crisis that the country has not yet found the will to truly fix – and a large part of the reason why has nothing to do with how Indians drive, and everything to do with how Indian cities have been built.
On February 26, 2026, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari stood before the 3rd National Conclave on Road Safety in New Delhi and did something politicians rarely do with uncomfortable data. He got specific. Overspeeding kills approximately 1,20,000 people on Indian roads every year. Not wearing a helmet accounts for over 54,000 deaths. Skipping the seat belt, a habit so common it barely registers as dangerous anymore, contributes to more than 14,000 fatalities. And then there are the children. Over 10,000 of them, below the age of 18, die on Indian roads every single year.
Let that last number sit for a moment.
Gadkari also pointed to drunk driving, wrong-side driving and mobile phone use as major killers. None of this is new information. That, perhaps, is precisely the problem.
The Infrastructure Excuse Is Running Out – But So Is the Behaviour Excuse
India has built roads at a pace that would have seemed implausible a decade ago. Expressways, tunnels, upgraded national corridors. Gadkari himself has overseen much of it. But somewhere along the way, a convenient assumption took hold: that better roads would mean safer roads.
They haven’t. Not nearly enough.
The numbers from the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways tell a story of relentless deterioration. In 2022, India recorded 4,61,312 road crashes. That is 1,68,491 people killed and over 4,43,000 injured. Fifty-three crashes and 19 deaths every single hour of every single day. By 2023, it had got worse. Some 4,80,583 accidents, 1,72,890 dead. Provisional 2024 figures pushed the fatality count to 1,77,177. A 2.3% year-on-year rise. In the wrong direction.
Gadkari’s diagnosis is that the engineering problem is largely solved and the crisis is now one of behaviour. He is not wrong. But he is only half right. And the half he is missing is the one that city planners have been trying to get governments to hear for thirty years.
India’s roads are not just badly driven on. They are badly designed for the people who actually use them.
The City That Was Never Built for Walking
Two-wheeler riders and pedestrians together account for well over sixty percent of road fatalities in India. That is not a coincidence. It is the predictable outcome of urban planning that has, for decades, prioritised vehicle throughput over human safety.
Walk through any mid-sized Indian city and the evidence is immediate. Footpaths that vanish into encroachments. Pavements colonised by parked vehicles, electricity poles, vendor stalls and construction debris. ITDP India’s Nagpur Urban Streets Assessment Report, released in July 2025 in partnership with the Nagpur Municipal Corporation, recorded over 1,900 obstructions across just ten kilometres of surveyed streets – with erratically parked vehicles identified as the single most common barrier. On Ring Road, one of the city’s busiest corridors, over 90% of pedestrians were forced to walk directly on the carriageway because the footpaths were broken, missing or entirely absent. In Pune, a 2024 report attributed to the Pune Municipal Corporation found that only 53% of roads in the city have footpaths at all. Bengaluru, Chennai and Mumbai tell variations of the same story.
This is not a behaviour problem. This is a planning failure. And it is one that no amount of seat belt enforcement or helmet awareness campaigns will fix.
Whose City Gets Built
The deeper question, one that the road safety conclave circuit rarely asks, is whose version of the city gets built and for whom.
Master plans across Indian cities have consistently allocated right-of-way to vehicles. Road widening projects routinely eliminate footpaths in the name of easing traffic congestion. FSI regulations and building bye-laws incentivise structures that generate vehicle access while neglecting pedestrian setbacks. The Smart City Mission spent significant public funds on surveillance infrastructure and cosmetic streetscaping in several cities while leaving basic pavement continuity untouched.
Meanwhile, those 10,000 children are not dying on expressways. They are dying near schools, in residential colonies, on arterial roads without adequate crossings – in the urban fabric that planners and municipal engineers have shaped, and continue to shape, every time a master plan is revised or a road is widened.
Traffic police in most Indian cities are underfunded, undermanned and operating without adequate technology – not because the political will for enforcement is absent, but because municipal budgets consistently prioritise road construction over road management. Building a new flyover attracts ribbon-cutting ceremonies. Staffing a traffic enforcement unit does not.
And Yet. Fatalities Keep Climbing.
The Motor Vehicles Act has been amended. Fines have gone up. Digital challans and automated speed cameras have been deployed in cities. The government has introduced drowsiness detection devices for commercial trucks and made twin helmet provision compulsory with two-wheeler purchases. On paper, the regulatory architecture is more robust than it has ever been.
And yet. Fatalities keep climbing.
The gap between legislation and lived reality on Indian roads is, frankly, enormous. Enforcement is patchy. It varies by state, by district, by whether there happens to be a special drive running that week. The result is that most drivers have quietly calculated, not unreasonably based on experience, that the odds of being penalised for speeding or skipping a helmet are low enough to ignore.
Sweden worked out through its Vision Zero programme that you cannot engineer your way out of a road safety crisis on infrastructure alone. Japan reached similar conclusions. Both countries combine strict enforcement, safe road design and sustained public education into something approaching a genuine safety culture. Crucially, both also design their streets around pedestrians and cyclists first, and vehicles second. India has adopted the Vision Zero framework in name. Building it into the actual geometry of Indian streets is a different challenge altogether.
There are signs, at least, that some cities are beginning to understand this. Nagpur has redesigned fifteen to twenty kilometres of roads with footpaths, cycle tracks and improved signage. Gurugram has piloted a model road with sidewalks, cycle lanes and lighting. Pune’s Comprehensive Mobility Plan envisions footpaths integrated with metro corridors. These are not solutions. They are proofs of concept. Scaling them to the full urban network of any one of these cities, let alone the country, remains an enormous and largely unfunded task.
Who Is Actually Dying
It is worth being precise about this because aggregate numbers can obscure what is really happening. The bulk of those being killed, roughly sixty percent, are between 18 and 35 years old. Young men and women at the beginning of their working lives, often the primary earners in their families. When they die, or are seriously injured, the consequences ripple outward. Into household incomes, children’s schooling, elderly parents left without support.
Road accidents cost India an estimated 3.14% of GDP every year. That is a number large enough to fund significant expansions in public healthcare, education or rural infrastructure, instead being absorbed year after year in hospital bills, disability costs, lost productivity and insurance claims. It is one of the more staggering examples of a preventable drain on the national economy that receives far less policy attention than it deserves.
What Happens Next
Gadkari has committed to cutting road accident deaths by 50% before 2030, in line with the Stockholm Declaration on Road Safety. It is an ambitious target. With fatalities still rising, it is also, right now, a distant one.
What the 3rd National Conclave made clear is that the Minister understands the scale of the behavioural challenge. What it did not make clear is whether the government is prepared to also confront the planning and governance failures that make dangerous behaviour so easy and so lethal.
Behaviour change matters. But you cannot ask a pedestrian to behave their way to safety on a road that was never designed to keep them alive.
India has heard the alarm before. The challenge now is not just to stay awake – it is to look honestly at the streets we have built, and ask who they were really built for.
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