Despite hosting only 1% of the world’s vehicular fleet, India accounts for around 11% of road traffic fatalities, due in some part to widespread non-compliance with wearing seat belts and helmets while driving. Post-crash investigations have often revealed victims being ejected from vehicles or suffering lethal secondary collisions against vehicles’ interiors; children are also vulnerable due to the patchy use of child restraint systems and rear-seat belts. Recently, a Supreme Court Bench asked the Road Transport Ministry to consider a petition to reduce road traffic deaths by habituating the use of these measures. Actual policing is certainly wanting, including due to chronic shortages of traffic police cadres; there is also room to constrain manufacturers to install tamper-proof seat belt reminders and thwart modifications after purchase. The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act 2019 instituted or scaffolded various mechanisms to prevent road traffic deaths whereas the national data so far have not presented evidence of improvement at the scale India needs.
However, in 2024, Road Transport Ministry data said that two-wheeler riders constituted 46.2% and pedestrians 20.6% of road deaths. Seat belts and child restraints only protect occupants of enclosed vehicles, so better enforcing their adoption will address the reasons underlying only one-third of the total mortality. In fact, speeding has been found to be the dominant recorded violation associated with fatalities, and a national strategy focused on mitigating opportunities for vehicles to accelerate to high speeds may yield greater gains. Second, neither the Union government nor State governments have systematically employed the ‘Safe System’ approach. While individual responsibility and the duty of care accruing to schools and similar institutions matter, governments are still expected to design roads assuming that not everyone will behave perfectly. Put differently, they need to reduce the probability as well as the severity of crashes, including by identifying and fixing accident-prone locations, setting up physical environments that compensate for human error, reducing children’s exposure to two-wheeler traffic, and improving timely access to trauma care. Finally, India lacks a public culture that reinforces safe behaviour and deters unsafe behaviour. For India to reduce road mortality in a sustained manner, governments must treat safety through a combination of approaches that does not overstate the role of individual decisions. It is also commendable that the Court has referred the petition to the Centre, rather than assume an interventionist posture as it did in 2019, in a tacit acknowledgment that road safety has outgrown judicial fiat.
Published – September 12, 2026 12:10 am IST
