India continues to top road accidents fatalities globally, with over 1.72 lakh deaths in road crashes in 2023, says Gadkari

“In the areas outside schools and colleges, 35,000 accidents and 10,000 deaths took place. A total of 35,000 deaths are of pedestrians. A total of 54000 deaths happened due to not wearing helmets and 16000 deaths have occurred due to not wearing seat belts. A total of 12000 deaths have occurred due to overloaded vehicles. Similarly Driving without a valid license accounted for around 34000 of the total crashes. The remaining deaths occur due to old vehicles, old technology like not being able to apply brakes etc.,” said Gadkari during the event.

Gadkari further said that the most important thing in this is that the highest number of road accident deaths in the world occurs in India and out of this, the highest number of deaths occur in Uttar Pradesh.

“There have been 44000 road accidents in UP and out of these 23650 deaths have occurred. Of these, 1800 deaths are of people below 18 years of age and 10000 are of pedestrians and two-wheelers. There have been 8726 deaths due to over speeding,” said Gadkari in Lucknow.

Gadkari said that these accidents are happening because people do not have respect and fear for the law.

“There are many reasons for accidents, but the biggest reason is Human Behavior. This is also true that there are potholes on the roads at many places. There is a lack of underpasses and foot over bridges. We have identified the black spots in this road engineering problem and such spots are being rectified on the National Highway by spending about Rs 40,000 crore. All roads are not under me, I am the Minister of National Highways only. There are many state highways and district roads. It also concerns the state government. The cause of the accident can be found and rectified,” said the Minister.

He said that instructions have been given to companies to improve automobile engineering. Along with this, an awareness program is being run.

“We are trying to ensure that the state government includes Rules of the Road in its curriculum. We were talking about reducing accidents by 50 percent by 2024, but they have not reduced. This means we need to do more work,” said Nitin Gadkari.

Sources said that the Road crash severity i.e fatalities per 100 crashes have marginally decreased to 36 in 2023 from 36.5 in 2022. Over speeding is the major cause of accidents, where 68.1% people in 2023 died because of this reason. Two wheelers users accounted for 44.8% and pedestrians accounted for nearly 20% of all road crash fatalities.

On an average, in 2023, India witnessed 1,317 road crashes and 474 fatalities every day or 55 crashes and 20 fatalities every hour.