- Wednesday, March 05, 2025
By: Shubham Ghosh
Road accidents are emerging as a major menace in India. In September, Cyrus Mistry, a prominent Indian industrialist, died in a horrific car crash in the western state of Maharashtra. In December, Prahlad Modi, the younger brother of Indian prime minister Narendra Modi, was involved in a car accident along with his family in the southern state of Karnataka.
On the penultimate day of 2022, ace India cricketer Rishabh Pant survived a deadly car accident in the northern state of Uttarakhand where his Mercedes Benz crashed into a road divider and burst into flames. The cricketer sustained serious injuries in the incident.
According to the latest data released by India’s ministry of road transport and highways, the country witnessed 412,432 road accidents in 2021 in which 153,972 people were killed. The number of people who got injured is 384,448.
It has also been reported that road accidents went up by 12.6 per cent year-on-year in 2021. There was an increase of 16.9 per cent year-on-year fatalities and 10.39 per cent year-on-year injuries caused by road accidents in the last year.
The ministry’s annual report ‘Road Accidents in India – 2021’ said of the accidents, 128,825 happened on national highways (including expressways); 96,382 on state highways; and 187,224 on other roads.
“Road accidents attributable to various types of traffic rule violations reveal that over-speeding constitutes the main violation associated with accidents and accident-related deaths and injuries, for the fourth consecutive year in 2021,” the report said, adding that violation of any traffic rule constitutes human mistake.
“But from the perspective of road safety strategy, violations such as over-speeding and driving on the wrong side do not constitute human error alone but are also possible faults in road design. The approach opens up the scope for road engineering measures to address problems which are, prima facie, considered to be human error and enforcement issues,” it said.
According to the World Health Organization, at least one out of 10 people killed on roads across the globe is from India.
“Road safety continues to be a major developmental issue, a public health concern and a leading cause of death and injury across the world,” India’s road transport and highways minister Nitin Gadkari said.
He said that the cost of road accidents is borne not just by the victims and their families but by the entire economy in terms of untimely deaths, injuries, disabilities, and loss of potential income.
“It is indeed a matter of great concern that despite the continuing efforts of the government in this regard and our commitments for halving fatalities we have not been able to register significant progress on this front,” the minister said.
