IIT Madras Launches Integrated Road Safety Dashboard

The Indian Institute of Technology Madras (IIT Madras) has developed a groundbreaking 'Integrated Road Safety Dashboard' designed to transform how India manages road safety through comprehensive data integration and evidence-based policymaking. This innovative digital platform creates a standardized yet flexible approach to road safety governance that can be customized for different regional contexts while maintaining national consistency.

The dashboard is envisioned as a scalable, configurable and replicable digital public infrastructure that can be adopted by States and Union Territories across India, perfectly aligned with their respective road safety strategies and governance frameworks. This technological breakthrough addresses one of India's most pressing public health challenges by providing decision-makers with the analytical tools necessary to save lives through targeted, data-driven interventions.

Advanced Digital Infrastructure for Data-Driven Governance

Integrating Diverse Data Streams for Comprehensive Analysis

By integrating data from multiple government departments and presenting information through real-time analytics and actionable insights, the dashboard empowers leadership at all levels to identify risk areas with precision, assign clear responsibility for interventions, track implementation progress systematically, and measure impact objectively through quantifiable metrics.

This multi-source data integration represents a fundamental shift from fragmented information silos to a unified analytical framework. The platform consolidates inputs from transport departments, police agencies, road-owning authorities, health services, urban development bodies, and emergency response systems into a single coherent interface that reveals patterns invisible when data remains departmentally segregated.

RBG Labs Innovation in E-Governance

Developed by RBG Labs at IIT Madras, this cutting-edge digital platform represents a major advancement in electronic governance, demonstrating conclusively how technology can enable coordinated, data-driven decision-making in complex public policy domains such as road safety. The development team combined academic research excellence with practical governance understanding to create a tool that bridges the gap between data collection and policy implementation.

Odisha's Successful Implementation During Road Safety Month

Pioneering State-Level Adoption

The Integrated Road Safety Dashboard has already demonstrated its potential through successful adoption by the Government of Odisha and is now positioned for wider replication across India. As part of 'Road Safety Month 2026' celebrations underway during January 2026, Odisha recently launched the dashboard in a high-profile ceremony that showcased the platform's capabilities to other state governments and transportation officials.

The dashboard's modular design allowed Odisha to customize workflows, performance indicators, and reporting structures while adhering to a common national framework that ensures data compatibility and inter-state comparison capabilities. This flexibility proved crucial for addressing Odisha's specific road safety challenges, including rural highway accidents, urban congestion-related incidents, and coastal region transportation risks.

Practical Benefits for State Transportation Leadership

Elaborating on the practical application of the new system, Amitabh Thakur, Transport Commissioner-cum-Chairman, State Transport Authority (STA), Government of Odisha, said, "The dashboard provides the analytical backbone and monitoring we need for sustained enforcement and interventions. By employing a data-driven, human factors-based approach, we are empowering our officers with access to modern technology to deal with road safety, ultimately helping us save lives and make our roads safer for everyone."

Thakur's endorsement highlights how the platform translates complex data into clear operational guidance for field officers who implement safety interventions daily. Traffic enforcement personnel can now prioritize high-risk locations, emergency response teams can optimize deployment strategies, and engineering departments can justify infrastructure investments with concrete evidence.

Addressing Multi-Departmental Coordination Challenges

The Complex Nature of Road Safety Governance

Road safety has emerged as a national priority, with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and State Governments increasingly recognizing the urgent need for systematic, data-driven interventions. While significant efforts have been made in recent years, road safety remains a multi-departmental challenge involving transport agencies, police forces, road-owning authorities, health systems, urban development departments, and numerous other stakeholders.

In the absence of integrated systems, actions have often been fragmented, with limited coordination between agencies and insufficient use of data to guide interventions and monitor outcomes. A police department might focus on enforcement while remaining unaware of engineering improvements planned by the public works department for the same high-accident corridor, resulting in missed opportunities for synergistic impact.

Breaking Down Institutional Silos

The Integrated Road Safety Dashboard addresses this long-standing gap by enabling coordinated action across departments and moving governance from isolated data collection to outcome-oriented implementation. Department heads can now see what other agencies are doing in specific locations, coordinate timing of interventions for maximum effect, and collectively monitor whether combined efforts are actually reducing accidents and fatalities.

Technology Innovation Meeting Public Policy Needs

Academic Research Supporting Governance

Highlighting the need for such initiatives, V. Kamakoti, Director, IIT Madras, said, "Road safety is a complex public challenge that demands coordinated action, institutional accountability and intelligent use of data. This dashboard exemplifies how academic research and technological innovation can directly support governance and public service delivery. By enabling evidence-based decision-making and cross-departmental collaboration, this platform has the potential to significantly strengthen road safety management across States and Union Territories in India."

Director Kamakoti's statement emphasizes IIT Madras's commitment to translating cutting-edge research into practical solutions for India's most pressing challenges. The dashboard represents exactly the kind of innovation-to-impact pathway that premier educational institutions should pursue, moving beyond theoretical publications to create tools that directly improve citizens' lives.

Responding to State Government Requirements

The platform was developed in direct response to feedback from State Governments that expressed the need for systems that translate raw data into clear, actionable insights, support inter-departmental accountability mechanisms, and allow continuous monitoring of intervention effectiveness. This dashboard has been designed precisely to meet these explicitly stated requirements from actual governance practitioners.

Key Features and Analytical Capabilities

Officials' Portal for Executive Decision-Making

Key features include a comprehensive officials' portal offering executive summaries tailored to different leadership levels, location intelligence tools that visualize accident patterns geographically, monitoring dashboards that track departmental performance against targets, and visual analytics that make complex statistical relationships immediately comprehensible to non-technical decision-makers.

Senior leadership can use the dashboard to identify accident hotspots through heat maps and cluster analysis, monitor departmental performance against established key performance indicators, assess the effectiveness of engineering improvements like road redesigns, evaluate enforcement campaigns' impact on violation rates and accidents, measure emergency response times and outcomes, and plan targeted interventions with precision based on evidence rather than assumptions.

Citizen Portal for Public Participation

The platform includes a citizen portal that enables public reporting of accidents, road hazards, infrastructure defects, and grievances related to road safety, thereby strengthening transparency, building public trust in government responsiveness, and enabling participatory governance that leverages millions of road users as distributed sensors for safety problems.

Citizens can photograph dangerous potholes, report missing signage, identify confusing intersections, and suggest safety improvements based on their daily road usage experience. This crowdsourced intelligence complements official data sources and often identifies emerging problems before they result in serious accidents.

Building on eDAR National Accident Database

Foundation in National Data Infrastructure

The dashboard builds on the foundation laid by the Integrated Road Accidents Database (iRAD), currently referred to as eDAR (electronic detailed accident report), which serves as the national accident database of the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways. This system was conceptualized and designed by RBG Labs, IIT Madras, and implemented by the National Informatics Centre Services Incorporated (NICSI).

The availability of a comprehensive national accident database significantly strengthens the basis of decision-making by providing standardized, detailed information about every reported accident across India. However, while eDAR enabled robust data capture, State Governments needed platforms that could translate this data into actionable strategies.

From Data Collection to Action Implementation

The platform represents a fundamental shift from a 'data-only' approach to a comprehensive 'data plus action' paradigm. Simply collecting accident reports, while valuable, does not automatically lead to safer roads. The dashboard transforms passive data storage into active intervention planning and performance monitoring that closes the loop between information gathering and life-saving action.

Citizen Engagement and Transparency Mechanisms

Building Public Trust Through Openness

By institutionalizing data-driven decision-making, enhancing interdepartmental coordination, and embedding accountability into everyday governance processes, the Integrated Road Safety Dashboard sets a new benchmark for leveraging digital platforms to address complex societal challenges that require sustained, coordinated effort across multiple stakeholders.

The transparency features ensure that citizens can see how their tax money is being used to improve road safety, which interventions are succeeding or failing, and how their local area compares to state and national benchmarks. This openness builds public confidence in government competence and commitment to addressing road safety seriously.

National Scalability and Future Expansion Plans

Replication Across States and Union Territories

As the dashboard scales nationally, the initiative holds the promise of significantly strengthening India's collective efforts to reduce road accidents, save lives, and build safer roads for all citizens and visitors. The modular architecture ensures that even small Union Territories with limited technical capacity can implement the system successfully with appropriate support.

States can learn from each other's successful interventions, replicate proven strategies adapted to local conditions, and collectively contribute to a national knowledge base about what works in Indian road safety contexts. This collaborative learning approach accelerates progress far beyond what isolated state efforts could achieve.

Long-Term Vision for Road Safety Transformation

The ultimate goal extends beyond technology implementation to fundamentally transforming India's road safety culture. By making data-driven decision-making routine rather than exceptional, the dashboard institutionalizes evidence-based governance that will continue improving road safety outcomes for decades to come, potentially saving hundreds of thousands of lives and preventing millions of injuries.