Seven years on, India’s road safety law yields zero prosecutions

Around 5.20 am on September 20, a BMW carrying four young men was negotiating a curve on Mumbai’s Coastal Road when it lost control, crashed through the roadside barrier and flew off the elevated road, plunging 75 feet onto an under-construction parking lot below. Three students were killed and a fourth was critically injured in the crash near Lotus Jetty, close to Haji Ali.

Police said the BMW appeared to have been travelling at around 120 kmph on the main carriageway, where the speed limit is 80 kmph, although its exact speed will be established during the investigation. Police are also probing whether alcohol consumption played a role, while the Regional Transport Office will examine the wrecked vehicle for mechanical failure or human error.

However, so far, authorities are not probing whether the curve, or other elements of the road, complied with applicable safety standards, especially if the design could have prevented the automobile from flying and falling 75 feet. Especially since at least 12 crashes have been reported on the 10.58-km road since its inauguration in 2024, resulting in at least seven deaths. “Road design is not something we are investigating. The police have no role in looking into the road or whether there is any fault in its design,” a senior police official investigating the crash said.

Geetam Tiwari, professor emeritus at IIT Delhi’s TRIP (Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme) Centre said a vehicle leaving the carriageway should ideally not mean an inevitable fatality.

Tiwari said Indian road-design standards already incorporate the global best-practice principle of “forgiving road design” such as crash barriers, medians and shoulders to reduce the consequences of driver error in Indian road designs. “But the current legal framework lacks teeth to ensure faulty practices are penalised, and there is also a need to increase the capacity of the police and other agencies to apply that law in practice.”

According to Section 198A of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, designated authorities, contractors, consultants and concessionaires responsible for road design, construction and maintenance and introduced penalties in the event of death or disability due to lapses. This accountability framework one of the much-publicised features of the act, which came into force seven years ago this month.

However, the provision has not produced a prosecution yet according to government data furnished to Parliament as recently as August. This is despite Union minister of road transport and highways Nitin Gadkari himself mentioning the problem multiple times. “Most of the road accidents happen in the country due to small civil mistakes, faulty DPRs and nobody is held accountable. This gives me a feeling that basically the engineers are responsible for increasing road accidents. So, the main problem is road engineering and defective planning, and defective DPRs,” he had said on one such occasion during Global Road Infratech Summit on March 6, 2025.

That is the gap Shubham Kumar, who leads policy advocacy at Crashfree India, describes as a failure to examine whether the law itself is working. “We audit most things, but we are not in the habit of auditing legislation,” he said, arguing that the question should now be whether Section 198A is functioning on the ground and what mechanisms exist to enforce it.

The increase in the statutory penalty through the Jan Vishwas amendment has not necessarily solved that problem, Kumar said, without corresponding capacity among officials documenting and investigating serious crashes. “In at least four states, I have personally spoken to senior police and investigative officers, including senior IPS officers, who had little awareness of Section 198A,” he said. “Investigating officers need to know what road-related evidence must be documented and preserved so that a possible engineering failure can be technically assessed and, where warranted, accountability fixed under Section 198A. A stronger penalty means little if a case never reaches the provision.”

The recent increase in the statutory penalty has not necessarily solved that problem, through the Jan Vishwas Act, he said as it has not been matched by adequate training of police officials to investigate whether faulty road design contributed to a crash. “At least in four states, I have personally spoken to top traffic police officers (senior IPS officers) who claimed they had no knowledge about this,” Kumar said.

The problem therefore moves beyond the size of the penalty to the architecture needed to invoke it. For Section 198A to be applied, Piyush Tewari, founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, explained investigators first need a scientific mechanism to establish whether engineering faults contributed to a crash and that mechanism sits across three provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act. Section 135(1A) provides for scientific investigation of road crashes to detect engineering faults, while Sections 210C and 210D deal with road-engineering standards to be issued by the Union and state governments.

“But the majority of states have not even issued rules for Section 135(1A) scientific crash investigation, and the majority of states have not issued rules around 210D. The Union has only given a small reference to IRC codes in 210C, which is not comprehensive enough,” Tewari said.

Without those rules, the evidentiary chain becomes difficult to complete, with investigators having to establish how a road may have been unsafe, and which prescribed standard was violated and how that violation contributed to death or disability. Tewari said the Supreme Court has now directed states to frame rules under Section 135(1A), and expressed hope that they would be notified within the next year.

He also pointed to another part of the law that could broaden the focus beyond carriageways and barriers. States, he said, need to frame rules under Section 138(1A) for the protection of pedestrians, cyclists and other non-motorised transport. If a contractor fails to maintain a footpath or provide pedestrian facilities required under a contract and that failure contributes to a fatality, Tewari said, action could potentially be taken under Section 198A as well as relevant provisions of the Bharatiya Nyaya Sanhita in cases involving criminal negligence.

According to MoRTH’s 2024 crash data, pedestrians remain India’s second most vulnerable road users, accounting for 36,526 fatalities (20.6% of total deaths), behind two-wheeler riders (46.2%). Pedestrian deaths grew 3.7% year-over-year from 35,221 in 2023—and have nearly tripled from 12,330 in 2014—underscoring a severe decade-long decline in pedestrian safety.

This enforcement gap is particularly consequential on urban roads, where design decisions determine how pedestrians, cyclists and motorists interact.

Ranjit Gadgil, programme director at Pune-based civil society organisation Parisar and member of Road Safety Network, said court directions and technical standards ultimately have to be converted by governments and local authorities into rules, operating procedures and institutions. “All municipal bodies must have urban design cells to ensure that the designs are as per the IRC guidelines. Institutional structures need to be put in place so these guidelines translate into actual designs which are then implemented on the ground, as recent IRC guidelines already give pedestrian safety and movement the highest priority in their recent iterations.”

He added that it is only through state-level sub-legislation under the MV Act and comprehensive Non-Motorised Transport (NMT) rules, which states have already been directed to notify as part of an earlier Supreme Court judgment, that accountability at the city level will be fixed.