Eyes on the road

Why in the News

A Supreme Court Bench has asked the Road Transport Ministry to consider a petition seeking a reduction in road traffic deaths through habituating the use of seat belts and helmets. The Court referred the petition to the Centre rather than issuing directions itself, a departure from the interventionist posture it took on road safety in 2019. India carries about 1 per cent of the world’s vehicular fleet and about 11 per cent of the world’s road traffic fatalities, and widespread non-compliance with seat belts and helmets is part of the reason. The measures the petition turns on protect occupants of enclosed vehicles, and the largest share of India’s road deaths is among people who are not inside one. A strategy built on restraint use therefore reaches a minority of the mortality it is meant to reduce.

What is the ‘Safe System’ approach?

1. Its starting assumption: The approach assumes that road users will not behave perfectly, so the road environment is designed to absorb error rather than to punish it.
2. What it acts on: It works on both the probability of a crash occurring and the severity of the crash when one does occur.
3. Where it places responsibility: Responsibility is shared between the user and the agencies that design, build and manage roads, rather than resting on the user alone.

Why does enforcing restraint use reach only a third of road mortality?

1. The fatality mix is dominated by unenclosed users: Road Transport Ministry data for 2024 recorded two-wheeler riders at 46.2 per cent and pedestrians at 20.6 per cent of road deaths.
2. The arithmetic of the enforcement case: Seat belts and child restraints protect only occupants of enclosed vehicles, so better enforcement of their adoption addresses the reasons underlying one-third of total mortality.
3. What restraint use does prevent: Post-crash investigations have repeatedly found victims ejected from vehicles, or killed in secondary collisions against the vehicle’s own interior.
4. Children are the exception within the enclosed group: Child vulnerability is raised by the patchy use of child restraint systems and of rear-seat belts.

Where does the enforcement and compliance model fall short?

1. Policing capacity is the binding constraint: Actual policing is wanting, including because of chronic shortages in traffic police cadres.
2. The vehicle is a lever that is not being used: Manufacturers can be required to fit tamper-proof seat belt reminders, and modification of those systems after purchase can be blocked.
3. The statute already provided the machinery: The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019 instituted or scaffolded various mechanisms to prevent road traffic deaths, and national data so far show no evidence of improvement at the scale India needs.
4. The social reinforcement is missing: India lacks a public culture that reinforces safe behaviour and deters unsafe behaviour, so compliance depends on the presence of an enforcer.

Does responsibility for a crash rest with the user or with the road?

1. The user side is real but bounded: Individual responsibility matters, and so does the duty of care owed by schools and similar institutions.
2. The design duty does not transfer: Governments are still expected to design roads on the assumption that not everyone will behave perfectly, which is a standard no individual user can satisfy on the state’s behalf.
3. The dominant violation points away from habit: Speeding has been found to be the dominant recorded violation associated with fatalities, and a national strategy aimed at removing the opportunities for vehicles to reach high speeds may yield greater gains than a further compliance drive.
4. Neither level of government has taken the design route: The ‘Safe System’ approach has not been systematically employed by the Union government or by State governments.

What would a Safe System require governments to do?

1. Identify and fix the locations that concentrate deaths: Accident-prone locations are identified and then rectified, so the same site stops producing crashes.
2. Build environments that compensate for error: Physical design absorbs a mistake instead of converting it into a fatality.
3. Reduce children’s exposure to two-wheeler traffic: The exposure itself is treated as the risk, rather than the child’s compliance with a restraint.
4. Improve timely access to trauma care: Survival after a crash depends on the speed with which definitive care is reached.
5. Act on severity as well as frequency: The two objectives are distinct, and a measure that lowers crash numbers without lowering impact forces leaves mortality where it was.

Challenges to adopting the Safe System approach in India

1. A single corridor has several road owners: A highway passing through a city changes hands between the national authority, the State works department and the municipal body, each with its own design standard. Eg. Urban stretches of national highways inside municipal limits are maintained by the local body, and the corridor itself remains a national highway.
   The Fix: Assign one accountable road owner per corridor, with a statutory duty to rectify identified black spots, meaning locations carrying a recorded cluster of fatal crashes.
2. Vehicle safety regulation is built around the car: Crash protection standards and consumer ratings cover enclosed vehicles, and the largest share of deaths is among riders. Eg. Crash test ratings under the Bharat New Car Assessment Programme apply to cars and not to two-wheelers.
   The Fix: Extend a crash protection rating and mandatory anti-lock braking across the two-wheeler fleet, and separate rider space on high speed corridors.
3. Black spot rectification is treated as a works item: Fixing a fatal cluster is funded and measured as civil construction rather than as a safety outcome. Eg. Black spots are carried on a rolling ministry list and closed on completion of the works, not on a subsequent fall in fatalities.
   The Fix: Make an independent road safety audit a condition for opening and for reopening a corridor, with the audit report published.
4. Trauma care is not built to the clock that decides survival: The referral chain is organised by administrative geography rather than by response time. Eg. Cashless treatment for road accident victims during the first hour after a crash was provided for in the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, and the scheme giving effect to it was notified only in 2025.
   The Fix: Map every high fatality corridor to a designated trauma facility within a stated response time, and fund the ambulance network against that map.
5. Children travel on two-wheelers under rules nobody checks: The safeguards for a child pillion exist on paper and form no part of routine enforcement. Eg. The Central Motor Vehicles Rules were amended in 2022 to require a crash helmet and a safety harness for a child aged nine months to four years, with a speed cap of 40 kmph.
   The Fix: Enforce the harness and the speed cap through school transport regulation and checks at school gates, where the exposure is concentrated and repeated daily.

Conclusion

The referral leaves the design question with the executive, which is where the power to answer it sits. A programme built on habituating restraint use can raise measured compliance without moving the fatality curve, because the users dying in the largest numbers are not inside a vehicle at all. The unresolved question is whether safety is treated as a behaviour problem, which makes the citizen the variable, or as a design problem, which makes the road authority the variable. What to watch is whether the Road Transport Ministry’s response to the petition commits to speed management and corridor redesign with State-level targets, or to another enforcement drive.

Back2Basics: Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019

1. What it amended: It amended the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988, the central statute governing licensing, registration, permits, traffic regulation and third party insurance.
2. Penalties: It raised the penalties for offences including over-speeding, drunken driving, driving without a licence, and failure to wear a helmet or a seat belt.
3. Institutions it provided for: It provided for a National Road Safety Board to advise the Centre and the States on road safety and traffic management standards.
4. Victim support: It provided for a Motor Vehicle Accident Fund to give compulsory insurance cover to all road users in India, and for protection of a Good Samaritan who assists an accident victim.

Matching Previous Year Question

“[2014, GS3, 12 marks] National Urban Transport Policy emphasises on ‘moving people’ instead of ‘moving vehicles. Discuss critically the success of the various strategies of the Government in this regard.”