There is hardly a family in India without a road-crash story. A father who never came home. A cousin whose leg never healed properly. A child hit outside a school gate. A delivery rider who left the news before his family had recovered.

My story is from 2005. I was at IIT Bombay. One night, a batchmate and I were riding a Kinetic home late through Mumbai. He was driving. I was on the pillion. We did not see a divider in time. The scooter hit it, and he was thrown across the road. I fell on the near side. A taxi ran over him. We picked him up, and I held him in my lap on the way to the hospital. He did not survive. I walked away without a scratch.

What stayed with me was not only grief. It was the unfairness. Same vehicle, same night, same crash. One of us lived and one did not.

That is the place road death occupies in Indian life. It is close enough to wound almost every family, yet familiar enough to feel normal. And because the system is fragmented, it rarely learns.

In 2023, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways recorded 172,890 road deaths, the highest number India has logged. Even that is likely an undercount. The WHO once estimated the true toll at roughly 300,000 in 2016, about twice the official count for that year. The government's Sample Registration System also put 2022 deaths far above the police count. The exact number matters. So does the fact that we still cannot agree on it. When a country cannot count road deaths cleanly, it cannot see the problem clearly enough to learn from it.

We usually talk about the visible causes: speeding, drunk driving, bad roads, missing helmets, weak enforcement. All are real. But they do not explain the deeper failure. That is a failure of trust in the systems around a crash.

I mean trust in a practical sense. Can institutions trust the data they use? Can a bystander help without fearing punishment? Can a family reach the compensation it is owed? Can the engineer, police officer, hospital, and judge work from the same account of what happened? Too often, the answer is no. When a system cannot trust its own picture of a crash, it cannot learn from it.

There is a working example. Piyush Tewari founded the SaveLIFE Foundation after losing a teenage cousin in a crash. The foundation rebuilt a stretch of the Mumbai-Pune Expressway using the Safe System approach. This approach starts from the fact that people make mistakes, even when trained. Roads and emergency systems should be designed so those mistakes are less likely to kill. After more than 3,500 engineering defects were fixed and ambulance response fell from about 35 minutes to under 10, deaths on that corridor fell by roughly half between 2016 and 2020. The lesson is not that drivers there suddenly became better. The system stopped allowing as many mistakes to become fatal.

I did not come to this work from a safe distance. Neither did Amar Srivastava and Deepanshu Gupta, who founded the Indian Road Safety Campaign and built Crashfree India with Gajendra Jangid, my co-founder at Cars24. The last eighteen months of this work have brought the failures close. One pattern keeps coming back: they are connected.

The first failure is memory

Start with the data. India has several road-death systems that do not reconcile: police-based MoRTH and NCRB figures, survey-based Sample Registration System estimates, and the WHO's modeled numbers. The same crash should contribute to one shared picture. Instead, the estimates can differ by more than a lakh of deaths. A wrong baseline makes targets performative and evaluation little more than a guess.

Digitizing paperwork will not fix this by itself. Systems like iRAD and eDAR point in a useful direction. One geo-tagged record is better than several disconnected forms. But digitizing a bad diagnosis still produces a bad diagnosis. If an official is rewarded for closing a file rather than tracing how a crash happened, faster data entry only speeds up poor judgment.

Roads everyone knows are dangerous

The same gap appears on the road itself. Crashfree's Project Rakshak, a youth-led infrastructure effort, works on a part of road safety that formal systems often miss: places locals already know are unsafe, but that authorities may act on only after people are hurt or killed. A blackspot should not have to earn its name through repeated deaths.

By mid-2026, Rakshak teams had assessed more than 120 high-risk locations across 18 cities and secured approvals for fixes at 25. Those sites had likely seen more than a thousand crashes once under-reporting is considered. The planned interventions were expected to reduce crash risk there by a fifth to a half. The point is not only the scale. It is the method: authorities can be shown where roads are dangerous before more deaths force their attention.

The work also found that crash data for these sites was almost certainly undercounted, because non-fatal crashes often disappear from formal records. The road was telling one story. The file was telling another.

After the crash, opacity keeps killing

The same break continues after impact. This is one of the least discussed failures in Indian road safety. India can pass a Good Samaritan law, publish ambulance numbers, and announce compensation schemes. The Good Samaritan protections were set out by the Supreme Court in 2016 and later written into Section 134A of the Motor Vehicles Act. But when citizens do not know their rights, hospitals respond unpredictably, and families cannot navigate the system, a law on paper does not create trust in practice.

You see the gap in the first minutes after a crash. A crowd gathers. Nobody knows whom to call or what helping the victim might cost them.

That is why even a first-responder card matters. Early Crashfree material reduced roadside action to three words: Check, Call, Care. Make the scene safe, call 112, control bleeding, and start CPR if needed. In a working system, these steps would be clear. In India, that clarity is itself missing infrastructure. Helping someone should not require private courage and improvisation every time.

You see the gap again in trauma care. A visit to the AIIMS Trauma Centre makes the problem concrete. Many serious crash victims still arrive without meaningful care before reaching hospital. Ordinary people, often rickshaw drivers, end up acting as first responders without training or equipment. Even at a leading trauma centre, the chain before arrival is thin.

This is why PM RAHAT, the government's cashless-treatment scheme for crash victims, matters. It provides eligible victims with up to ₹1.5 lakh in cashless treatment for up to seven days under the scheme. Hospitals and police still need to coordinate so a crash victim can get care without delay. The scheme's details set out its limits and eligibility.

Then there is compensation. The law exists, but access is broken. In January 2025, the Supreme Court observed that very few victims benefit from the schemes because public awareness is low and authorities do too little to explain them. A 2021 World Bank study found that only 14% of poor households affected by a crash received any compensation. The financial blow amounted to more than seven months of household income.

Crashfree's field brief, Justice Unserved, describes the system beneath those numbers. Hit-and-run claims are filed for roughly 12% of eligible crashes each year. Seventy percent of surveyed low-income households did not know compensation existed. Nine in ten pending hit-and-run claims are stalled on paperwork. Hundreds of crores remain unclaimed in tribunals, including ₹459 crore in Bombay. The national backlog exceeds ten lakh cases worth more than ₹80,000 crore.

Middlemen step into that gap. Unregulated “ambulance chasers” approach victims at hospitals and offer to handle claims for a commission. In 2021, the Bar Council suspended 28 advocates for filing fake motor-accident claims. When a system is opaque, trust gets privatized and sold back to the victim. India's problem is not only compensation law. It is access to compensation.

Many families do not know how to navigate a compensation claim. They need accessible, case-specific legal help and clear support through the process. A 90-minute awareness session and a printed checklist can help them get started. At helpdesks run inside AIIMS and Sharda Hospital, more than a hundred families queued for that support. This is what opacity looks like up close. People need money, but they also need help understanding the process. Policy says a victim can claim. Trust means the victim knows it, believes it, can prove it, and can stay with the process long enough to receive it.

Nobody owns the chain

The failure to learn is cultural as well as administrative. India still treats road deaths as the natural cost of growth: more vehicles, wider roads, rising fatalities for a while, then a quiet shrug. We have built speed, volume, and aspiration. We have not built a safety system to match them.

One line kept recurring in this work: information is infrastructure. Weak crash data weakens safety design. Hidden hazards weaken prevention. An unclear compensation process weakens access to justice. These failures persist in part because responsibility is divided across transport departments, police, hospitals, local governments, courts, insurers, and ministries. Each can point to its own part and still leave the person on the road inside a failure nobody owns end to end.

That is why India has so much sincere road-safety activity and so little visible outcome. Many people own a piece. Too few are responsible for the full chain.

A mobility company that wants the upside of the category cannot treat its downside as somebody else's ministry. That is why this work cannot be a CSR sidecar or an awareness week. Any company that benefits from mobility at scale has some responsibility to make the system easier to understand, quicker to respond, or less dangerous. Safety is part of mobility itself.

None of this means Crashfree has solved the problem. It has not. By mid-2026, the work had begun to show another model. Identify dangerous infrastructure before it causes more deaths. Treat compensation as part of justice rather than a legal footnote. Build public tools as well as reports, and use research to help institutions act.

A mature road-safety system assumes people will make mistakes. Its job is to make those mistakes less likely, less severe, easier to respond to, and easier to learn from.

Safer roads do not begin when drivers become perfect. They begin when systems can see, respond, and learn well enough that human imperfection is less likely to be fatal.

Notes and Sources