Broken Roads, Broken System: Why India’s Road Safety Keeps Failing

The article “Broken Roads, Broken System: Why India’s Road Safety Keeps Failing” is a critical look at India's continuing road safety failure, which could be credited to a lack of developed infrastructure, poor road design that was not supported by scientific principles, and inefficient enforcement procedures. It emphasizes the role of low-quality construction, the absence of accountability, and safety audit oversights in the high rate of crashes. The review notes that there is an urgent need to reform the institution and perform data-driven planning to decrease the number of deaths that can be avoided.

The road safety crisis issue in India is old and multidimensional, even though it has had decades of influence on policies and infrastructural investments. The country accounts for almost 11 percent of all the road deaths throughout the world, with more than 150,000 fatalities every year, which shows that there is a systemic malfunction in making sure that people can move about in a safe manner. Although behavioural reasons like speeding and failure to obey the traffic rules have thus far drawn attention, the need to consult with the emerging research is that there is a deeper structural problem, which is the general incompetence of the road infrastructure itself. The layout of carriageways, incompetent construction standards, and the absence of auditing safety measures have also made most roads dangerous in nature. The lack of signage, substandard drainage, and unsafe curves exist both on the national highways and the urban flyovers, as well as on rural link roads, and these factors increase the risks of accidents despite the behaviour of the drivers. Besides, the issue is compounded by institutional weaknesses in guarding, imposing, and controlling contractors. 

This Article is a critical review of the infrastructural deficits, as opposed to human error, can play in the Indian road crash epidemic. It uses recent statistics and court observations to say that road safety discourse needs to change paradigm, responding actively to enforcing rules instead of being reactive and safe.  India's road safety crisis stems from a combination of poor road infrastructure, inconsistent enforcement, and human error, rather than a single cause. Problems include weak road design, inadequate maintenance, a lack of proper driver training, and weak enforcement of traffic laws.

Systemic Infrastructure Inadequacies

The problem with road safety in India lies in an inherent lack of systematic infrastructural faults affecting its mobility, safety, and accountability to people. This discussion focuses on the main structural failures that sustain a high level of risk of a crash.

Poor Geometry and Surface Quality of the Road
India has a large portion of roads whose geometric design and surface conditions have dismayed it. According to the statistics provided by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), over 40 percent of national highways lack proper lane demarking, shoulder width, and proper gradients. These shortcomings result in unpredictable driving conditions, especially in the curves and ranges where visibility and control of the vehicle are compromised. Moreover, vehicles experience instability because of potholes and uneven surfaces, and waterlogging (usually during the monsoon season), and, as a result, increase the likelihood of skids, rollover, and head-on collisions.

Lack of Safety Measures and Safety Guidelines
Pedestrian crossings, crash barriers, reflective boards, and rumble strips are mostly missing or kept in poor condition over long routes of Indian roads. According to the report on the safety of the roads published in the year 2025 by the organization named Safe India Smart India, it is stated that only 30 percent of the surveyed highways had the lighting and signage systems working. Moreover, regular routine maintenance is continually overlooked due to the divided jurisdiction between centre and state, which leads to delayed repairs and uncontrolled degradation and especially in high goods liability areas like fly-overs, underpasses, as well as the black spots which frequently lead to accidents.

Contractor Non-Compliance and Ineffectual Oversight
Significant infrastructure projects are usually undermined due to the poor workmanship that may be caused due to the breach of the agreed safety protocols by the contractors. Audits are not very common, and the punishment for breaches is not often applied. After the case of 2025 accidental deaths on the roads, uncovered by The Hindu investigation, revealed that many parts of the roads where accidents occurred failed the quality checks, but were still running. The lack of third-party analysis and electronic surveillance allows the construction shortcomings to go unaddressed, compromising the trust that people place in the institutions and making them accountable.

Inequality in Urban-Rural Provision of Infrastructure
Infrastructure is usually better invested in urban centres, but rural roads are in a pathetic condition. The rural roads are mishandled by narrow roads, a deficiency of footpaths, and poor lighting, making the rural roads highly unsafely. According to the 2024-25 Annual Report published by MoRTH, over 60 percent of road fatalities occur in rural regions, even though more traffic is carried by the city areas, further highlighting that a lack of equity in terms of providing infrastructure, in which safety is not driven by traffic density but design.

Unscientific Road Design and Planning

The road safety crisis in India is compounded by the fact that it has embraced unscientific road design and planning, which is a systematic neglect of the engineering principles, user diversity, and the environment around them.

Geometric Arrays
A big percentage of Indian roads are made without following any geometric criteria, which have been scientifically developed. The other commonly found attributes, such as sharp curvature and sudden change in elevations and blind crossing features, occur in both city and rural network structures. These geometric failures reduce visualisation and adequate response, especially at high-speed vehicles. The Press Information Bureau (2025) reports that numerous crashes caused by the deficiency of civil engineering practices (inconsistent curvature and slope gradient) are the reason for a large percentage of fatal crashes. Moreover, the absence of transitional areas between high-speed and low-speed territory leads to abrupt deceleration and unbalanced swerving to other lanes and increases the risk of collisions.

Weaknesses in Integrating the Land Use and Traffic Flow
One of the common shortcomings of road-planning schemes relates to insufficient regard for the nearby land use, thus leading to dangerous contact between motorists, pedestrians, and business firms. Roadside restaurants, informal shops, and illegal crossings usually surround highways, thus interfering with traffic and increasing the risks of crashes. The editorial of The Hindu highlights that this unplanned construction close to the highways is an indicator of the lack of spatial planning and integration of transport and urban-development organizations. This kind of fragmentation degrades the safety of the vulnerable road users, as well as promotes disorganized traffic patterns.

Lack of User-Centric Design Standards
The modern design of the Indian roads rarely considers the needs of different users, such as pedestrians, cyclists, elderly people, and citizens with disabilities. There is little to no footpath, cycle lanes, and tactile paving, which are in poor condition. As much as inclusive design principles are stipulated in the National Road Safety Policy (NRSP), they are applied haphazardly. The flaws in prioritizing the principles of universal design highlight an overall systemic bias of motorized transport application at the expense of vulnerable and non-motorized users, as evidenced by the DistilNFO EHS 2025 report.

Absence of Database Planning and Safety Audits
The road projects are usually done without a thorough safety audit or crash-data reviews. The technologies of Geographic Information System (GIS) and Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR), required by the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, are underutilized. Planning is therefore reactive and not preventive. There is a need to consider evidence-based interventions, and most road designs do not take into account the past crash statistics and anticipated traffic density.

Poor Accountability and enforcement

Weak accountability and enforcement systems reinforce the integrity of the infrastructure, law enforcement, and confidence of the people in the enforcement systems, which contribute to the road safety failures in India.

Absence of punishment mechanisms for the contractors
One of the factors that is leading to unsafe roads is the lack of punishment for contractors who present poor infrastructure. Although there are clear rules as guided by the Indian Roads Congress and MoRTH standards, a good number of road projects do not pass any quality examination and are still in operation. According to a Firstpost report (2025), contractors are seldom held responsible for the crashes associated with inefficient construction despite poor drainage, lack of signs, or pavement malfunctions being recorded. This impunity is due to the lack of contract enforcement, as well as independent audits to enforce those, so safety violations remain unpunished.

Weak Driver Training Systems and licensing
Violation of enforcing extends to the licensing system, whereby driving licenses are issued regularly without strict examination or regular training. According to The Hindu (2025), driving exams are often watered down and made mere manipulations on small tracks, and do not go through the actual safety tests. This compromises the role of licensing to filter down the rationale so that untrained drivers are placed on the roads, which are not well equipped to deal with complex traffic conditions. The absence of standardized training programs and the digital control is also another blow to the system in terms of making drivers competent.

Decentralized Authority and Management
Institutional responsibility for road safety is lacking, allowing central, state, and municipal agencies to have a loose involvement. The whitepaper 2025 by the Road Safety Network focuses more on the overlapping jurisdiction aspect, which weakens accountability, where no particular agency is mandated to implement all types of roads with safety norms. In addition, the lack of real-time data integration e.g., ANPR and GIS-based crash mapping, also constrains proactive enforcement and policy feedback loops.

Policy Inertia and Judicial Observations
The policy reform is yet to pick up, even though an effort was undertaken in the jurisdiction of the Supreme Court, as it recently became aware of a mass-casualty crash. The spread of roadside encroachments, the absence of crash audits, and the inability to act on safety recommendations have been identified by the courts. However, the implementation bodies normally interpret these instructions as guidelines instead of directives. The designation of the legal mandate and the State administrative implementation is indicative of an underlying governance failure that continues the conditions of unsafe roads.

Neglected Urban-Rural Connectivity

Although there have been massive expansions on the national highway network, connection breakdown between rural and urban areas has continued to greatly affect the on-going crisis of road safety in India.

Inequalities in Road Quality and Road Safety Infrastructure
Sometimes the rural roads are poorly maintained with no necessary safety facilities provided, such as lane markings, street lights, crash posts, and footways. Press Information Bureau (2024) stated that even though the capital expenditures on national highways have changed significantly, there is still not considerable spending on rural connectivity, and it has not been equally deployed. Poor quality of surfaces, narrow carriageways, and a lack of signage make rural roads overly unsafe to the unprotected users like pedestrians, cyclists, and two-wheeler riders, thus leading to high fatality rates despite the depletion of traffic on such roads.

Unsafe Urban to rural network transition zones
The interface between high-speed urban expressways and peripheral rural link roads is usually harsh and not controlled. Due to the shift of vehicles out of the fast corridors into poorly designed rural stretches, a change in geometry, traffic concentration, and user behaviour is experienced abruptly. This discrepancy increases the chances of collisions, particularly in peri-urban areas where the transition of infrastructures is not controlled. The projects to develop expressways often neglect the inclusion of safety on the feeder road, leading to discontinuous mobility ecosystems.

Absence of Comprehensive Mobility Planning
Due to urban-oriented planning, the countryside transportation requirements are side-lined. In the course of the increasing smart-city projects and the development of metro systems that are monopolizing the city budgets, the countryside faces shortages in the last-mile connections and operations. According to the India Brand Equity Foundation (IBEF), even though 23 new national highways are planned to be completed by the year 2025, credibility in terms of integrating them with the rural economic sectors is not ideal. This dislocation negatively disrupts not only the safety but also the fairness with regard to access to education, healthcare, and markets.

Policy Loopholes and Lapses in Monitoring
As frameworks are in place, like Pradhan Mantri Gram Sadak Yojana (PMGSY), there is no consistency in their implementation since monitoring is not built in, and crash data are not integrated. The rural road safety audit is done infrequently, and the hot spot of accidents is not documented. Without the granular data and geospatial mapping, it is impossible to implement specific interventions. This compound is further inhibited by the fact that rural road safety does not have a single national monitoring dashboard that could be depended on to forcefully take corrective measures.

Conclusion

The lack of road safety in India cannot just be explained by the failure of individual people alone, but systemic and institutional failure, to the level of structural and institutional inadequacy. These elements include poorly designed roads, a lack of guided design principles, weak implementation, as well as the roads neglecting connections between urban and rural transport systems, which lead to poor safety of the road users. Despite the policy structures and judicial intrusions, the lack of accountability and data-driven planning remains a persistent phenomenon that is causing unnecessary deaths. The only way to come out of this crisis is to have a paradigm shift, which is not reactive interventions, but proactive, interdisciplinary reforms, which include infrastructure, governance, and citizenry. Integrated planning and strict control can only transform India into a safer and more equitable transport ecosystem that is concerned with human life and mobility justice.