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New Delhi. India lives in its villages, Mohandas K Gandhi said. But increasingly, the people of India are dying on its roads.

India overtook China to top the world in road fatalities in 2006, and it has continued to pull steadily ahead — despite a heavily agrarian population, fewer people than China and far fewer cars than many Western countries.

While road deaths in many other big emerging economies have declined or stabilized in recent years, even as vehicle sales increased sharply, in India fatalities have skyrocketed — up 40 percent in five years to more than 118,000 in 2008, the last year for which figures are available.

A lethal brew of poor road planning, inadequate law enforcement, a surge in trucks and cars, and a flood of untrained drivers have made India the world’s road death capital.

As the country’s fast-growing economy and huge population increase its importance on the world stage, the rising death toll is a reminder that the government still struggles to keep its more than one billion people safe.

In China, by contrast, which has undergone an auto boom of its own, road deaths have been decreasing for much of the past decade, to 73,500 in 2008, as new highways segregate cars from pedestrians, tractors and other slow-moving traffic, and the government cracks down on drunken driving and other violations.

Evidence of road accidents seems to be everywhere in urban India. Highways and city intersections often glitter with shards of broken windshields, and they are scattered with unmatched shoes, shorn-off bicycle seats and bits of motorcycle helmets.

Tales of rolled-over trucks and speeding buses are a newspaper staple, and it is rare to meet someone in urban India who has not lost a family member, friend or colleague on the road.

The dangerous state of India’s roads represents a “total failure on the part of the government of India,” said Rakesh Singh, whose 16-year-old son, Akshay, was killed last year by an out-of-control truck in Bijnor, in the state of Uttar Pradesh, as he walked along a highway to a wedding.

The truck crushed Akshay so completely that his father could identify him only by his shirt. Then the truck ran over another man and drove away.

Reckless driving and the mixing of pedestrians and fast-moving heavy vehicles are common. The expressway that runs southeast from Delhi to Greater Noida, a fast-growing satellite city, cuts through farmland interspersed with new industrial parks and shopping malls.

The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing road laws or they take bribes to overlook them; punishments for violators are lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to obtain with a bribe.

Kamal Nath, minister of road transport and highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a priority for the national government.

The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation on that in Parliament.

International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act. Reducing road deaths “requires political commitment at the highest level,” said Etienne Krug, director of the department of violence and injury prevention at the World Health Organization.

India’s government is “just waking up to the issue,” he said.

Nath, who was India’s commerce minister before moving to highways last year, has increased highway expansion plans, and is raising $45 billion from private investors to expand India’s two million miles of roads.

The expansion is an integral park of keeping the country’s economy, growing at about 9 percent a year, humming, Nath said.

Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon.

Private companies building and running new highways in India say that their hands are sometimes tied.

From his office overlooking a 32-lane tollbooth, Manoj Aggarwal, chief executive of a road building company called Delhi-Gurgaon Super Connectivity, said he sees hundreds of traffic violations every day that he cannot stop.

“Look at this man in the middle of the road,” he said during an interview, pointing to a pedestrian slowly weaving his way through the traffic. “I can’t fine him, I can’t punish him.”

In 2008, 73 people were killed on just this 17-mile stretch of highway, earning it the nickname Expressway to Death. The death toll declined as Aggarwal added safety features that were not part of his government contract.


The New York Times