A Journey We Took for Granted
Close your eyes and picture this: One early evening, after a 12-hour shift in Bengaluru’s tech corridor, 28-year-old Ravi sat on his motorcycle, anticipating a good meal and a relaxing evening at home. He approached a newly widened highway expectantly, looking to disembark the crowded thoroughfare and have a smooth, safer ride to his house. Very soon after the merge onto the highway, after he took a cut across to pass a slow-moving truck, his helmeted head struck a pothole, and the motorcycle wobbled, and it was over. In that instant, the trajectory of Ravi’s life, and his family’s life, was now upside-down.
Ravi’s wife, back at home, got a call: “He’s in surgery…” That is one of the hundreds of stories hidden behind the data we hear each day.
In 2025, the stark reality is that as India celebrates rapid expressways, smart cities, and multi-lane highways, tens of thousands are dying on those very roads. In the first six months of 2025 alone, nearly 26,770 people died on India’s national highways. National Highways make up only about 2 % of the country’s roads, yet they are responsible for over 30 % of all road-accident fatalities.
For every kilometre laid, the question must be asked: Whose life did we risk in doing so? Are our roads built to move cars fast or to keep people safe? This essay probes into how India’s model of “build at speed” may have sidelined the human cost of mobility, and why redevelopment needs a recalibration.
The Scale of the Crisis: Alarming Numbers, Real People
The numbers are heavy, and behind each is a human story. The tally of 26,770 deaths in just six months on national highways serves as a thunderous warning. For 2024, the figure was about 52,609 deaths on NHs alone. To put it bluntly: if one highway crash takes a life every few minutes somewhere in the country, then rapid infrastructure without safety is not progress, it is peril.
Consider the stretch of the Agra–Lucknow Expressway, a modern four-lane corridor where 3,843 of 7,024 accidents between Jan 2021–Sept 2025 were caused by drivers falling asleep at the wheel. Picture the fatigue, the long haul, the truck driver pressing on because the deadline must be met, not because the route is safe.
Or think of the district of Bagalkot in Karnataka: On the previously launched segment of the National Highway 52, which earned the local title “death‐trap,” 473 accidents and 46 fatalities were recorded between January and Sept 2025. Drivers and families are losing loved ones not just because of reckless behaviour, but because the design and road conditions invite disaster.
And in Noida, between January and August 2025, the city logged 797 crashes, resulting in 311 deaths on expressways and major roads, roughly one death every day. Speeding, wrong-side driving, helmet non-use, and drunk driving are all familiar culprits, but are magnified by high vehicle density and infrastructure built for momentum rather than caution.
These stories evoke not just statistics but grief, dashed dreams, financial ruin, and emotional trauma. The wife waiting for her husband, who never returned home; the child who lost a father; the commuter whose career derailed because of a fractured spine. The numbers remind us there is a massive human cost to the “fast lane.”
Infrastructure Development vs. Road Safety: The Fault-Line
Modern India is constructing roads at a breakneck pace. Mega-corridors, elevated highways, sophisticated expressways, the ambition is high, and rightly so. Infrastructure is a pillar of development. But when the build focuses on speed and volume, while safety and human value lag behind, we create a dangerous fault line.
Consider this paradox: high-speed corridors that are supposed to reduce travel time are increasingly death zones. Although the government has installed advanced traffic management systems (ATMS) on many NHs and expressways, the fatalities persist. Why? Because high speed without human-centric design is like giving a teenager a sports car but no driver education.
In many cases, road engineering is blamed. The ministry revealed that of the vast lengths of national highways audited, 1,12,561 km had undergone safety audits in the last three years. Yet, the mere audit doesn’t fix the problem. On the Mumbai-Ahmedabad corridor (NH-48), over 30 people died in more than 50 serious accidents between January and June 2025. Despite a white-topping project, potholes and tyre marks remained, and underpasses and pedestrian bridges were delayed. This reveals not just engineering failure but a disconnect between construction milestones and user safety.
The myth of “build faster = develop faster” is dangerously incomplete. A highway may widen the market access and reduce freight costs, but if it also shortcuts safety, the human cost grows. The daily commuter navigating a newly built corridor must trust that the design anticipates risk: clear signage, rest spaces (especially for long-haul drivers), safe crossings, lighting, and adequate shoulders. Many of these standards are still lacking.
And then there’s the overlooked reality of “black spots,” little stretches of road known locally for lethal repetition. The government stated 8,542 black spots have seen short-term remedial measures and 3,144 need long-term fixes. But what about the people who cross them each day? Every journey through a known danger zone is an act of trust in the system, signage, and enforcement. And when that trust breaks, life breaks too.
In urban areas, the infrastructure push often extends to flyovers, expressways, and high‐volume corridors without equal attention to pedestrian safety, two-wheelers, and public transport users. The high-speed lanes may benefit the 4-wheeler, but the delivery scooter, the pedestrian, and the cycle-rickshaw user become the unseen body in the cost ledger.
In short, infrastructure development in India is impressive, but the missing link is safe infrastructure development. Without it, we are chasing growth numbers while burying young lives. What’s the point in connecting A to B if many people never reach B alive?
The Human Ripple: Families, Futures, and Fractured Dreams
When a crash happens, it’s not just metal that breaks; it’s an entire web of lives.
In Nagpur’s “Operation U-Turn,” a traffic-safety campaign that cut road deaths by 62 % within a few months, officers found that every accident death left behind an average of five dependents struggling emotionally and financially. For each family, the tragedy continues long after the headlines fade.
A mother in Jaipur, who lost her teenage son in a speeding trailer-truck collision in July 2025, now keeps his school ID card in her wallet, a symbol of everything he could have become. “He wanted to design cars,” she said quietly to a reporter. “The same thing that killed him.”
The sorrow expands far beyond the family. The hospital that receives crash victims becomes a site of trauma for staff, too; the workplace loses a colleague; a child loses guidance. Road accidents do not happen in isolation; they drain human potential from the nation’s future.
In cities where ambulances weave through choked lanes and trauma centres overflow, the question isn’t just how we drive, it’s what we value. If our progress measures kilometres of highway but not lives saved, then perhaps we have confused movement with meaning.
Systems and Responsibility: The State of Safety
India’s policymakers have long recognized the scale of the problem, but implementation remains uneven. The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act of 2019 introduced stricter penalties and emphasized road-safety audits, yet enforcement gaps persist. Police officers admit they can fine drivers, but cannot fix broken streetlights or absent signage. Engineers can design better curvature, but cannot curb drunk driving or fatigue.
Some states, however, show that change is possible. In Nagpur, a change as simple as synchronizing traffic lights and redesigning U-turns led to a significant reduction in fatalities over the course of a year. In Tamil Nadu, a road safety initiative at the state level led to a decline in deaths of greater than 25 % between 2016 and 2023 through black-spot identification and reforms to emergency responses. Each of these examples shows that when governments look at road safety as public health rather than just policing, great things can be accomplished.
However, to build on these successes, very high levels of coordination are required across jurisdictions, cities, and citizens. A culture of safe road users cannot be built by just concrete or even pavement; it needs to start in classrooms, at licensing offices, and in company or organization HR policies, with expectations of responsible road usage for commuting.
A Different Kind of Development
At a literal Crossroads, India is confronted with a promise beyond development. Every newly opened expressway celebrates hope for citizens returning home alive. In order to fulfil that promise, development must have a new meaning that balances ambition with moral duty.
To rethink development means to create highways that include actual stop-rest areas, speed-calming areas, emergency lanes, and pedestrian crosswalks. It means allocating a fraction of infrastructure budgets to safety audits and enforcement training. It means recognising that the dignity of life is the first infrastructure a nation must build.
The conversation should move from “How fast can we go?” to “How safely can we grow?”
Because progress that tramples its people on the road is not progress, it’s regression with asphalt on top.
The Road Ahead
Each evening, millions of headlights cut through India’s expanding road network, a bright constellation of human movement. As each vehicle passes, we are reminded there is a story in each car, bus, or bike: someone going home, someone behind on work, someone delivering a meal, someone being hopeful about tomorrow.
Those lights should not go dim before their time. If India is serious about leading the world in its new infrastructure while we still live to understand death, before all else, it must first lead in the capacity to value lives over travel speed, to teach that being stopped at a red light can prevent a lifetime of sorrow, and to always remember behind every accident statistic there is a name, a face, and members of a family waiting at the door. Only then will this country’s roads not be corridors of grief, but roads of life.