Why India's road accident and fatality numbers are rising again

The pandemic brought India's road accident numbers down from 456,000 in 2019 to 372,000 in 2020. In 2022, the figure was back to pre-pandemic levels

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India’s infamous graph of road accidents and fatalities has now not just caught up with, but also breached the pre-pandemic level. In 2022, there were 461,000 road accidents across India. That is slightly more than the number in 2019—the last ‘normal’ year before the Covid pandemic—when India saw around 456,000 road crashes. With successive lockdowns as the pandemic raged across India, the accident numbers had come down to 372,000 in 2020 before rising again to 412,000 in 2021.

The accidents also injured over 443,000 people in 2022, registering a 15 per cent jump over the previous year, according to latest figures released by the Centre on Tuesday, October 31.

The 2022 figures have once again brought the focus back on the myriad policy interventions towards road safety over the past nine years, including the passage of an overhauled and contentious Motor Vehicles Act in 2019, whose spelled out intent and purpose was to decrease road accidents and make the country’s roads safer for road users through stiff hikes in penalties for violations, electronic monitoring and the like. Data revealed that over 168,000 people were killed in road crashes in 2022, an increase of around 10 per cent over the previous year and around 10,000 more than 2019. For a few years now the total number of persons killed is what has been keeping India perched on top of the list of countries with the highest number road-crash deaths in the world.

“It is indeed a matter of great concern that despite the continuous 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,” minister for Road Transport and Highways Nitin Gadkari said in his message in the report—Road Accidents in India, 2022—published by his ministry after collating data from states and Union territories.

These numbers come just days after Gadkari, while attending the 27th World Road Congress in Prague in October this year, reiterated India’s commitment to meeting the global target of reducing road-accident-related fatalities by 50 per cent by 2030, set in the Third Global Ministerial Conference on Road Safety held in Stockholm in 2020. Gadkari has, on several occasions in the past, spelled out the government’s intentions of halving road fatalities over the next few years. The latest report indicates how far it remains from achieving that target. Tamil Nadu continued to record the highest number of road accidents whereas the number of persons killed in road accident was, once again, the highest in Uttar Pradesh in 2022. Over-speeding continued to remain the most major cause accounting for 72.3 per cent of all accidents across India and over two-third of all deaths and injuries. Drunken/ intoxicated driving, the jumping of red lights and the use of mobile phones while driving, taken together, accounted for 7.4 percent of total accidents and 8.3 per cent of total deaths. Around 3,395 people died in accidents caused because they were using their phones while driving. Over 6,000 people were injured for the same reason.

However, the report says that violations like speeding and driving on the wrong side of the road are not simply the result of human error, but may also be a result of lack of education, enforcement and possible faults in road design. As much as 67 per cent of accidents took place on straight roads, whereas accidents on curved roads, pothole roads and steep grade together accounted for only 13.8 per cent of the total accidents. Around half of the 16,715 people who died because they were not wearing seat belts were passengers. Similarly, of the 50,029 motorcycle/ scooty riders who died in accidents because they were not wearing helmets, over 14,000 were pillion riders. Over 100,000 people were injured because they were not wearing helmets, while over 42,000 suffered injuries in accidents because they did not wear seat belts.

Another notable fact is that there was a year-on-year jump of 22 per cent in the number of accidents due to potholes. They killed some 1,800 people, up from around 1,400 the previous year. Pothole-related accidents also injured almost 4,000 road users. While accidents have seen an overall increase, the country’s ever-growing network of national highways and expressways continued to bear over a third of all fatal crashes. The Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety had asked that the data for accidents on the national highways should reveal a jurisdiction-wise break, since the national highways are under the control of multiple agencies across India. Data shows that 66.3 per cent of accidents and 74.6 per cent of deaths took place on the national highways under the administrative control of the National Highways Authority of India. The national highways under various state Public Works Departments accounted for nearly 28.2 per cent of the road rashes and 20 per cent of the deaths. There had also been a consistent decline in number of accidents and injuries on national highways from 2018 to 2020, but the graph has been rising again since 2021.

For the fourth consecutive year, young people aged 18-45 made up the largest group of those killed in accidents. Those aged 18-45 years made up 66.5 per cent of the victims during, while the 18-60 years group made up 83.4 per cent of total fatalities. Subscribe to India Today Magazine