A Fortuner SUV registered in the name of the Khatu Shyam Mandir Seva Samiti already had nine pending overspeeding challans against it. Nine. Not one. Not two. Nine separate occasions on which the system flagged that this vehicle was being driven dangerously. Nine separate opportunities to intervene. Nine warnings that went nowhere.
On the night of May 18, 2026, that same Fortuner was driven at high speed down the Pushkar-Ajmer highway by Digvijay Singh Chauhan, a sevadar associated with the Khatu Shyam Temple committee. He was reportedly drunk. The vehicle rammed into three motorcycles near Pushkar Ghati at around 9:45 pm. One person was killed. Four were injured. When police reached the scene, they found cartons and bottles of alcohol inside the car. A temple trust vehicle. Loaded with liquor. Driven by a man connected to one of Rajasthan’s most revered religious institutions. With nine unpaid challans already on record.
The man who died was Ravi. He was a painter from Dholabhata in Ajmer. He was riding a motorcycle with his brother-in-law, Jitendra. Ravi is survived by four sisters. His father, Kishore Kumar, a retired railway employee, filed the complaint at Pushkar police station. Ravi was on his way home. He was not doing anything wrong. He was just on a road, at the wrong time, in front of the wrong car.
Who Is Digvijay Singh Chauhan?
It is important to get this right because social media and several headlines have called him a “priest.” He is not a priest in the traditional sense. Digvijay Singh Chauhan is described in police reports and news accounts as a sevadar, a volunteer or devotee associated with the Khatu Shyam Mandir Seva Samiti, the committee that manages affairs at the Khatu Shyam Temple in Sikar district.
After the crash, videos surfaced online showing him performing what appeared to be VIP-related duties inside the temple premises, managing access, facilitating visits, the kind of role that sits at the intersection of devotion and influence.
The distinction matters. Calling him a priest implies religious authority. Calling him a sevadar connected to a temple trust implies institutional access and the informal power that comes with association with a wealthy, politically connected religious body.
The Khatu Shyam Temple is one of the most visited shrines in Rajasthan. It attracts millions of devotees annually. Its seva samiti manages significant resources, including vehicles. The Fortuner that killed Ravi was one of those vehicles.
After the crash, reports emerged that Chauhan had been absconding for over 36 hours before being taken into custody. Questions were raised about the speed of the police response. The vehicle had been seized, but the driver had not been found. Whether this delay was incompetence or something else, the public was left to wonder.
Nine Challans and the System That Ignored Them
This is the part of the story that should disturb you more than the crash itself. Because the crash, horrifying as it was, could have been prevented. The system had nine chances to prevent it. And it did nothing.
India’s e-challan system is designed to automate traffic enforcement. Speed cameras, CCTV surveillance, and automatic number plate recognition systems detect violations, generate challans, and send them to the registered vehicle owner. The system works. It catches the violation. It generates the fine. And then, in a staggering number of cases, nothing happens. The challan sits unpaid. The vehicle continues to operate. The driver continues to speed. Nobody follows up. Nobody impounds. Nobody revokes. The system detects the problem and then shrugs.
Nine overspeeding challans mean this Fortuner was caught driving dangerously nine times. In a functioning enforcement system, the second or third violation should have triggered an escalation, a higher fine, a mandatory vehicle inspection, a summons to the registered owner, and a suspension of the vehicle’s permit. By the ninth violation, the vehicle should have been off the road entirely. Instead, it was still on the Pushkar-Ajmer highway at 9:45 pm on a Sunday, loaded with alcohol, driven by a drunk man, heading straight into Ravi’s motorcycle.
546 Deaths a Day, and Counting
India’s road death numbers are so large that they have stopped shocking people. According to the NCRB, 1.99 lakh people died in traffic-related accidents in 2024. That is 546 deaths every single day. Traffic accidents accounted for 42.6% of all accidental deaths in the country, the single largest contributor to accidental mortality in India. Over 4.52 lakh people suffered injuries. India accounts for 11% of all road deaths globally, despite having only 1% of the world’s vehicle population.
Overspeeding is involved in seven out of every ten fatal crashes. Drunk driving accounts for a smaller but devastating share, officially around 2.5% of fatalities, though this is widely believed to be underreported because blood alcohol testing is inconsistently conducted at crash sites. In about 50,000 of the 75,000 two-wheeler fatalities recorded in recent years, the victims were not wearing helmets, a statistic that says as much about enforcement failure as it does about individual behaviour.
The Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act of 2019 was supposed to change this. It introduced sharply higher fines and drunk driving penalties, which went from ₹2,000 to ₹10,000 for a first offence and up to ₹15,000 for repeat offences.
It introduced provisions for electronic enforcement, speed cameras, and automatic challan generation. On paper, the law is strong. On the road, the implementation is patchy at best. Several states have not fully adopted the amended fine structure. E-challan recovery rates remain low.
And the fundamental problem persists: there is no systematic mechanism to escalate enforcement when a vehicle accumulates multiple violations. The Khatu Shyam Fortuner is proof of that.
A Pattern We Keep Refusing to Break
If this story feels familiar, it is because we have been here before. In May 2024, almost exactly two years before the Pushkar crash, a 17-year-old in Pune drove his father’s unregistered Porsche Taycan into two motorcycle riders at 2:30 am after drinking at multiple bars. Two people, Aneesh Awadhiya and Ashwini Koshta, were killed.
The car was unregistered. The driver was underage. The family was wealthy. The case became a national flashpoint about privilege, accountability, and the selective application of traffic law.
The details change. The pattern does not. A powerful or connected person drives recklessly. Someone on a motorcycle, almost always someone less powerful, less wealthy, less protected, dies. The outrage lasts a news cycle. The system absorbs the shock and returns to its default setting: lax enforcement, uncollected fines, unpunished repeat offenders, and roads that remain among the deadliest on earth.
In Ravi’s case, the asymmetry is stark. A painter on a motorcycle. A temple trust Fortuner loaded with liquor. Nine prior warnings. One death. The man with the institutional backing survives. The man with no protection does not. This is not an accident in the sense that nobody saw it coming. The system saw it coming nine times. And looked away nine times.
When the Sacred and the Reckless Share a Registration Number
The fact that the vehicle was registered to a temple trust adds a layer to this story that is hard to ignore. Temple trusts in India manage enormous resources: land, vehicles, donations, and political access. The Khatu Shyam Temple is among the wealthiest and most politically connected shrines in Rajasthan.
A vehicle registered in the name of its seva samiti carries a certain weight. Whether that weight translates into informal immunity on the road or whether a traffic camera’s challan against a temple trust vehicle is treated with the same urgency as one against a private citizen is a question worth asking.
The recovery of alcohol from inside the vehicle raises its own questions. A car registered to a religious body, used by a person associated with that body, was found to contain cartons of liquor after a fatal crash. The temple trust has not, as of the latest reports, issued a detailed public statement about how its vehicle came to be in this situation, who authorised its use that night, or what oversight exists for vehicles registered in its name. These are not rhetorical questions. A man is dead. The vehicle that killed him belongs to an institution that millions of people trust.
What This Case Leaves Behind
Ravi was a painter. He worked with his hands. He supported four sisters. He was riding home on a motorcycle on a Sunday night on a highway he had probably ridden a hundred times before. He did not know that a Fortuner with nine pending challans and a drunk driver behind the wheel was heading toward him. He could not have known. That was the system’s job — to know, to act, to stop that vehicle before it reached him. The system had nine chances. It used none of them.
Digvijay Singh Chauhan has been arrested. He will face charges. The legal process will run its course. But the nine challans will not be prosecuted. The system that generated them and then ignored them will not face an inquiry. The gap between detecting a violation and actually enforcing a consequence will not be closed by this case, just as it was not closed by the Pune Porsche case, or the hundreds of fatal drunk driving crashes that came before it.
India issues millions of e-challans every year. It has speed cameras, automatic detection, and digital infrastructure. It has a law that prescribes heavy penalties. What it does not have is the will to enforce them consistently, especially when the vehicle belongs to someone with connections or to an institution that commands reverence. Until that changes, the challans will keep piling up. And the motorcycles will keep getting hit.
Nine warnings. One death. Zero lessons learned.
References
- DNA India — “Who is Digvijay Singh Chauhan? Khatu Shyam Sevadar alleged of ramming SUV into 3 bikes killing 1 in Pushkar; Alcohol bottles recovered” (May 2026). https://www.dnaindia.com
- Newstalk/Amar Ujala — “पुष्कर घाटी में मौत बनकर दौड़ी फॉर्च्यूनर” (May 19, 2026). https://www.newstak.in
- Amar Ujala — “Pushkar Ghati accident: 36 hours later the accused driver remains at large” (May 20, 2026). https://www.amarujala.com
- Vajiram & Ravi — “India’s Rising Traffic Deaths, Causes, Challenges, Road Safety Reforms” (May 2026). https://vajiramandravi.com
- Drishti IAS — “India Status Report on Road Safety 2024” (2024). https://www.drishtiias.com
- Data for India — “Road accident deaths” (March 2026). https://www.dataforindia.com
- Wikipedia — “2024 Pune Porsche car crash.” https://en.wikipedia.org
- Wikipedia — “Traffic collisions in India.” https://en.wikipedia.org
- PIB — “Deaths Due to Road Accidents in India” (2024). https://www.pib.gov.in
- Legacy IAS — “India’s 2024 Road Accident Report” (November 2025). https://www.legacyias.com