INTRO:
The fallout of a booming auto industry and a rapidly expanding highway network is unprecedented road fatalities. Our attitude to road safety is surprisingly unresponsive.
MATTER:
Unfortunately, the very first piece I am writing for Adfactors PR’s new Insights space had to be on something gruesome. But there is no way around it – all of us need to wake up from our slumber.
Initial data from The Ministry of Road Transport & Highways indicates that 2023 was a new record for the country for road fatalities: 172,890 Indians perished on our roads that year, a growth of 2.6 per cent over 2022. It translates to 474 dying on our roads every hour. Or 20 deaths every hour, if you prefer. That’s the equivalent of a fully loaded, all-economy configuration Airbus A380 – the largest passenger aircraft in the world – crashing every single day in India, killing all on board – a mega tragedy every day!
Let’s dig deeper into the 2023 data so that we can understand the significance of the figures better. Of the 173,000 deaths, 10,000 were minors. A staggering 35,000 crashes took place in front of schools and colleges, leading to 10,000 deaths. Vulnerable road users like pedestrians accounted for 35,000 deaths. 54,000 fatalities occurred because of not wearing helmets, while 16,000 were because of the non-usage of seatbelts. 12,000 deaths were due to overloading.
As you would expect, two-wheeler riders account for the largest chunk of overall fatalities, about 77,500 or a substantial 45 per cent of the total. Add other vulnerable road users like pedestrians and cyclists, it goes up by another 20 per cent. While the new Bharat New Car Assessment Programme (BNCAP) is intended to make passenger cars safer, no one is paying attention to this whopping 65 per cent of fatalities comprising vulnerable road users. Also those two-wheeler fatalities comprise the cream of India’s youth and a part of the earning population – male adults between 18 and 45 years of age.
The data we get from MoRTH is always a year late, so the data for CY2024 will be only available by the end of this year. I don’t look forward to it. But there’s no taking away from the fact that Indian roads are among the most dangerous in the world, and all of us use them.
According to a news item in The Economic Times late last year, the road death rate in India is substantially higher – at around 250 per 10,000 km as against 57 in the US, 119 in China and 11 in Australia. Another metric to look at is car penetration – according to a CRISIL report, India has 26 cars per 1,000 people (FY24), while global peers like China were at 183, Mexico at 280 and Brazil at 276 – by the way, this is CY21 data.
What these two metrics essentially mean is that our roads are deadlier than many other countries. For every kilometre, more Indians are dying, and despite having a low car penetration, more Indians are dying. And our roads are expanding and more people are buying vehicles… What can we expect?
The latest data from MoRTH proclaims that India has the second-largest road network in the world, and growing. In the last ten years, the National Highway network has shot up by 60 per cent – rising from 91.287 km in 2014 to 146,195 km in 2024. As for vehicles, Indians have been lapping them up, especially cars and two-wheelers. For CY2024, the industry reported 19.54 million two-wheeler wholesales (up 14 per cent), while passenger cars broke records by hitting the 4.27 million wholesale mark (up 4 per cent). Given this growth, do we expect road fatalities to fall?
If you have read this far, it perhaps has opened your eyes. To me, that’s a good start.