India's Breakthrough Road Safety Model for Viksit Bharat

Road safety in India has emerged as a critical development priority that directly impacts the nation's ability to achieve its Viksit Bharat 2047 vision. An Indian road safety expert has highlighted that safe mobility is not merely a transportation issue but a fundamental prerequisite for accessing basic rights to health, education, and economic opportunity. With fatality and injury rates in road crashes being 20-30 times higher than other transport modes, India is pioneering a Make in India model for the Global South that addresses unique challenges through culturally adapted solutions rather than imported Western approaches.

Speaking at the World Economic Forum Annual Meeting, SaveLife Foundation's founder and CEO Piyush Tewari emphasized that road safety should be a big part of the conversation because mobility gives us access to our most basic rights to health, education, and all other key development indicators that are so much a part of the Viksit Bharat 2047 mission.

Understanding the Scale of the Challenge

Road safety represents one of India's most pressing yet underappreciated development challenges. The issue affects millions of families across the country on a daily basis, creating a cascading effect that impacts economic progress, public health outcomes, and social equity. Unlike other development challenges that receive substantial attention and resources, road safety often remains on the periphery of policy discussions despite its enormous human and economic toll.

The Crisis Behind the Vision

Tewari, who started working in the area of road safety after losing a young family member in a road crash in 2007, went on to play a key role in framing India's Good Samaritan law. His personal tragedy transformed into a systemic mission to address the structural failures that contribute to India's road safety crisis.

When he began working in this area back in 2007, Tewari realized that something had to be done at a systemic level, not just at a behavioral level, to fix the issues causing such a large number of deaths. This recognition marked the beginning of a journey that would focus first on the Good Samaritan law and then on applying best practices on the ground by creating zero fatality corridors and zero fatality districts.

A Model for the Global South

What SaveLife Foundation is demonstrating at international forums like Davos is that there is a model for safer roads that is not coming from the West but coming from the Global South. This is a model that demonstrates what the lived realities in developing countries are and how solutions ought to be designed for the people who are most affected by road safety challenges.

The approach recognizes that solutions developed in Western contexts may not translate effectively to countries with different infrastructure, traffic patterns, economic conditions, and cultural norms. Instead, India is pioneering solutions that emerge from understanding local conditions and designing interventions that work within those constraints.

Cultural Empathy in Safety Solutions

The biggest differentiator in India's approach is the application of what Tewari calls cultural empathy, which recognizes what actually works in countries like India. This concept acknowledges that effective policy interventions must be grounded in cultural understanding rather than simply transplanting solutions from different contexts.

There are Good Samaritan laws in Western countries, including in France, where if you don't help someone, there is a penalty for it. However, in India, the challenge was fundamentally different. The problem was not that there should be a penalty for not helping; the challenge was that helping someone carried a penalty through legal entanglement.

Designing Context-Appropriate Solutions

This insight led to a completely different policy approach. Rather than threatening people with penalties for not helping, the solution was to insulate them from legal consequences and create a conducive environment for assistance. This represents a fundamental shift in policy thinking that prioritizes enabling positive behavior rather than punishing negative behavior.

Good Samaritan Law: A Case Study

The development and implementation of India's Good Samaritan law exemplifies how cultural empathy can drive effective policy. People who witnessed accidents were reluctant to help because they feared getting entangled in legal hassles, including endless court appearances and police interrogations. The traditional Western approach of mandating assistance through penalties would have failed to address the actual barrier preventing people from helping.

India's Good Samaritan law instead focused on protection and insulation. It created legal safeguards that prevented good Samaritans from being harassed or subjected to legal proceedings simply for helping accident victims. This positive enabling framework proved far more effective than punitive measures would have been in the Indian context.

Zero Fatality Corridors and Districts

When addressing actual road safety on the ground, it becomes essential to understand the on-ground realities of people who live alongside highways and the most vulnerable road users. There are pedestrians, cyclists, and public transport users who use these modes not by choice but often by compulsion because they simply don't have access to safer modes of transport.

SaveLife Foundation's work on various highways in India, including the Mumbai-Pune Expressway, the Yamuna Expressway, and various districts like Nagpur and Unnao in Uttar Pradesh, demonstrates that solutions work better when you operate at a hyper-local level. Now operating across 100 districts nationwide, the initiative shows that working with the lived realities of people enables the creation of meaningful change on the ground.

Scaling the Make in India Approach

The organization hopes to scale this effort across India and potentially make this a Make in India solution exportable to other low- and middle-income countries that are suffering from similar road safety challenges. This represents a reversal of the traditional development paradigm where solutions flow from developed to developing countries.

Economic Impact of Road Crashes

The economic importance of road safety cannot be overstated. According to World Bank data, India loses anywhere from 3-5 percent of its GDP every year because of road crashes alone. This translates to nearly $100 billion of economic loss that could be prevented if roads were made safer.

Beyond the GDP loss, approximately 64 percent of those killed in India and other low- and middle-income countries in road crashes come from extremely vulnerable economic backgrounds. These are people who are just emerging from poverty, and when a crash affects their family, it strikes like a bullet, pushing them back into the grip of poverty because the breadwinner is killed or maimed in these accidents.

Poverty Amplification Through Road Crashes

Since low-income households are most drastically affected by this issue, it becomes even more important to discuss road safety at forums like the World Economic Forum. A major contributor to poverty in the Global South is road crashes, and this issue must be brought into the center of the conversation regarding safe mobility and development in these countries.

Public Health and Equity Concerns

Road crashes contribute more fatalities than tuberculosis and malaria combined, which is TB, malaria, and HIV combined in the case of India. This represents a significant public health burden happening because of road crashes that often receives less attention than communicable diseases despite its comparable or greater impact.

The chances of getting injured or losing life in a road crash are nearly 20-30 times higher than most other modes of transport, and significantly higher compared to air transport. This disparity raises fundamental questions about transportation equity.

The Equity Question

Road safety ultimately becomes an equity issue about who gets access to safer roads or safer mobility. Is it only people who have the ability to purchase the safest cars or the safest modes of transport? Or should safe mobility be treated as a fundamental right accessible to all citizens regardless of economic status?