India’s Auto Boom Is Outpacing Road Safety: Why Road Safety Isn’t Scaling with Vehicle Growth

India’s growth story is increasingly visible on its roads. Highways now stretch deeper into the hinterland, cities are linked by faster corridors, and connectivity has become a backbone of economic mobility. Over the past decade, the national highway network has expanded by more than 60 percent, with construction continuing at a rapid pace daily. Meanwhile, tens of thousands of new vehicles hit Indian roads every day, reflecting rising incomes, growing logistics demand, and changing travel habits.

Yet this rapid expansion comes with a stark contradiction. Even as roads improve and vehicles become safer, India records some of the highest road crash fatalities globally: around 474 lives lost daily. Growth has delivered speed and scale, but safety has not kept pace.

A key challenge is how road usage has evolved. Roads are no longer simple transport corridors, they now serve school zones, hospitals, markets, residential areas, expressways, and freight routes within the same network. Pedestrians, children, cyclists, two-wheelers, buses, delivery vehicles, and private cars compete for limited space. Traffic volumes are denser, speeds are higher, and the mix of users is far more complex than a decade ago.

Yet road design and regulation have not kept up. Many rules still assume predictable traffic behaviour and prioritise vehicle movement over human safety. When infrastructure and policy lag behind real-world conditions, risk multiplies.

The Risk Is Concentrated Where Protection Is Weakest

The burden of road crashes falls disproportionately on vulnerable users—pedestrians, cyclists, and two-wheelers—who together account for nearly seven out of ten fatalities (around 68% as per MoRTH data. Two-wheelers alone make up almost majority of all fatalities, while rising pedestrian fatalities highlight the shortage of safe footpaths, crossings, and traffic-calmed streets. Speed remains the dominant factor, contributing to 68–70 percent of fatal crashes. Highways, though a small fraction of road length, account for over a third of fatalities due to higher speeds, while rural roads also show high death rates because of weak enforcement, poor lighting, inconsistent engineering, and delayed emergency response.

Beyond human loss, road crashes cost India an estimated 3–5 percent of GDP annually, with lower-income households bearing the heaviest financial burden. At a time when the central government is considering critical amendments to the Motor Vehicles Act, the opportunity to address these systemic gaps has rarely been clearer. Targeted changes can help ensure that India’s road safety laws catch up with today’s road realities.

Three Levers That Save Lives: Speed, Enforcement and Child Restraints

Closing the gaps requires focusing on the few interventions that consistently deliver the highest safety impact across India’s roads. Speed limits must reflect real-world road conditions and be set using scientific evidence and human injury tolerance, not just vehicle categories. Amendments to Section 112 of the Motor Vehicles Act can enable this shift by aligning speed limits with road function, surrounding activity, human injury tolerance levels, road environment, and the presence of vulnerable users. As traffic volumes grow, evidence-based speed management, aligned with global best practices and supported by periodic data-led reviews, becomes one of the most effective ways to reduce fatalities.

Enforcement must evolve in parallel. Two-wheelers and three-wheelers dominate urban mobility and account for a large share of fatalities. Clear inclusion of these vehicles under Section 183, with graded penalties linked to the severity of violations, can strengthen deterrence and better reflect actual road risk.

Built-in safety features are another critical area. Rear-seat belt usage remains weakly enforced, and children are often restrained using adult seatbelts due to legal ambiguity. Updating Section 194B to mandate the use of child restraint systems (CRS) for children under 12 years of age or below 150 cm in height, in line with global standards, is critical. Adult seatbelts are not designed to protect children and can cause serious injury in crashes. Clear legal provisions requiring age-, height-, and weight-appropriate CRS, along with unambiguous enforcement, will ensure that built-in child safety features are used effectively in real-world conditions.

Beyond saving lives, these changes also benefit the automotive ecosystem. Aligning vehicle safety standards with real-world outcomes helps ensure that OEM investments in airbags, crash structures, and child safety systems translate into measurable reductions in fatalities. Consistent rules across states reduce compliance uncertainty and reputational risk when vehicles are incorrectly blamed for crashes driven by human behaviour or unsafe infrastructure.

India stands at a pivotal moment where policy, industry, and infrastructure can align to redefine road safety. The MV Act amendments offer a chance not only to improve safety outcomes but to build a predictable, accountable, and outcome-driven mobility framework. Every new vehicle and every new kilometre of road represents an opportunity to make travel safer — and to ensure that growth does not come at the cost of human life.

Rinki Sharma is Project Leader, Consumer Voice, and Member, Road Safety Network. Views expressed are the author's personal.