Maharashtra Road Safety Council Silent for Three Years

Maharashtra has not convened its statutory State Road Safety Council meeting in over three years — a period during which the state has recorded more than one lakh road accidents and over 50,000 deaths. The last meeting of the State Road Safety Council, chaired by the transport minister and constituted as the apex policy body for road safety governance under the Central Motor Vehicles Rules, was held on April 4, 2023. Since then, more than 38 months have passed without a single meeting — despite rules that mandate the council meet at least once every six months. In a state ranked third nationally for road fatalities, this institutional failure is not merely a procedural lapse. It is a governance crisis with a measurable human cost.

Overview of Maharashtra's State Road Safety Council Failure

An Apex Body That Has Been Absent for Three Years

The State Road Safety Council is not a peripheral advisory committee — it is the apex statutory body responsible for reviewing accident trends, monitoring the implementation of road safety measures, identifying accident-prone black spots, and coordinating action among the departments dealing with transport, roads, policing, and public works. When this body fails to meet, the coordinated, multi-departmental road safety governance that Maharashtra requires does not happen at the highest institutional level — leaving individual departments to operate in silos, without the strategic alignment and shared accountability that the Council's oversight framework is designed to provide.

The Council was constituted in Maharashtra under Rule 215 of the Central Motor Vehicles Rules in May 2015, with biannual meetings subsequently held regularly until 2019. From 2015 onwards, there should have been 20 meetings of the State Road Safety Council as per the rules, but only 12 were held — a senior official confirmed on condition of anonymity. The meeting record already showed a pattern of inconsistency before the complete cessation in 2023. The three-year gap since the last meeting is the most severe manifestation of this institutional underperformance.

Statutory Obligation Ignored — Rules Mandate Six-Monthly Meetings

When Legal Requirements Are Treated as Optional

The Central Motor Vehicles Rules are explicit and unambiguous in their requirement: the State Road Safety Council must meet at least once every six months. This is not a best-practice recommendation or a policy aspiration — it is a statutory obligation that binds Maharashtra's transport minister, as the Council's chair, to convene the body at defined intervals.

The explanation offered by state transport department officials for the failure to convene — that meetings could not be held primarily due to the election code of conduct — is partially valid for specific periods during the Maharashtra Lok Sabha elections of May to June 2024 and the assembly elections that followed. Election codes of conduct typically impose restrictions on policy announcements and government expenditure during defined pre-poll periods, and can complicate the scheduling of statutory body meetings that might be perceived as politically motivated.

However, the 38-month gap since the April 2023 meeting extends far beyond any election code period — and the assertion that multiple high-power committees met to discuss road safety, and that important decisions were taken, cannot substitute for the statutory requirement of the Council itself. Parallel committees and informal reviews are valuable supplements to the Council's work, but they are not legal equivalents to the statutory body whose meetings are mandated by the Central Motor Vehicles Rules. A state government that allows 38 months to pass without convening its apex road safety governance body is not complying with the law, regardless of what other discussions may have taken place.

Over One Lakh Accidents and 50,000 Deaths During the Gap

The Human Cost of Governance Failure

The scale of Maharashtra's road safety emergency during the period in which the State Road Safety Council failed to meet gives concrete human meaning to what might otherwise appear to be an abstract institutional failure. More than one lakh road accidents and over 50,000 deaths have occurred in Maharashtra in the 38 months since April 2023. In the first quarter of 2026 alone, Maharashtra reported 9,259 road accidents that killed 3,858 persons.

These are not numbers generated by forces beyond the state's control. They are the accumulated outcome of driving behaviours, road conditions, enforcement patterns, infrastructure decisions, and coordination mechanisms — all of which are precisely the subjects that the State Road Safety Council is mandated to review, coordinate, and guide.

During the 38 months in which the Council did not meet, the multi-departmental oversight that might have accelerated black spot remediation, improved enforcement coordination, or expedited infrastructure decisions was absent at the apex level. The relationship between that institutional absence and the 50,000 deaths that occurred during the same period cannot be quantified with precision — but it cannot be dismissed as irrelevant.

Road safety activists and experts emphasise that statutory bodies like the State Road Safety Council must meet regularly, and that to achieve the target of reducing deaths and injuries by 50 percent by 2030, Maharashtra needs a clear action plan with targets for each department and accountability mechanisms — exactly the kind of framework that a regularly convening State Road Safety Council is designed to develop and monitor.

Maharashtra Ranked Third in National Road Fatalities in 2024

A State That Cannot Afford Institutional Indifference

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways data for 2024 placed Maharashtra third nationally in road fatalities with 15,715 deaths, following Uttar Pradesh and Tamil Nadu. This ranking underscores the scale of the challenge that a functioning, regularly convening State Road Safety Council should be addressing — and the cost of allowing the apex coordination body to remain dormant for more than three years.

Maharashtra's road safety profile is shaped by specific and well-documented risk factors: a large two-wheeler population with persistent helmet non-compliance, high-traffic expressways and national highways with significant accident concentrations, urban road environments in Mumbai, Pune, and Nagpur with complex pedestrian-vehicle interaction challenges, and a state highway network that connects major industrial centres through corridors with historically high fatality rates. A 77 percent share of road accident deaths attributable to two-wheeler riders and pedestrians — identified in a state study that prompted the launch of the Save Two-Wheeler Riders and Pedestrians in 2026 campaign in January — reflects a specific and addressable vulnerability that requires coordinated policy action across multiple departments.

Addressing this profile of risk requires exactly the kind of cross-departmental coordination, data review, and accountability that the State Road Safety Council exists to provide. The longer the Council remains inactive, the longer these risk factors develop without the benefit of apex-level strategic oversight.

Road Safety Fund — Rs 823 Crore Collected, Rs 65 Crore Spent

A Financial Governance Failure That Compounds the Institutional One

Maharashtra's institutional road safety governance failure extends beyond the Council's non-convening to a deeply troubling pattern of financial underutilisation. The Maharashtra government raised Rs 823 crore as a Road Safety Fund corpus since 2016 through a cess collected at the time of vehicle purchase — but actual spending on safety initiatives from this corpus reached only Rs 65 crore. The gap between Rs 823 crore collected and Rs 65 crore spent — a utilisation rate of less than 8 percent — is one of the most damning indictments of Maharashtra's road safety governance available.

The Road Safety Fund was established specifically to provide dedicated financing for road safety measures — black spot remediation, enforcement infrastructure, awareness campaigns, and emergency response capacity. A corpus of Rs 823 crore, if deployed effectively, could fund a transformative improvement in Maharashtra's road safety infrastructure. Instead, the funds have been largely used for the purchase of interceptor vehicles and basic enforcement equipment — important but narrow investments that barely scratch the surface of what a nearly Rs 1,000 crore road safety fund could achieve.

The State Road Safety Council, had it been meeting regularly, would have been in a position to review the utilisation of the Road Safety Fund and direct its deployment toward the highest-priority interventions. Its absence has allowed the financial governance failure to compound alongside the institutional one — leaving Maharashtra with both the resources and the statutory framework for transformative road safety improvement, and without the governance mechanism to deploy them effectively.

Transport Minister's Promise and the Accountability That Must Follow

July Must Mark the Beginning, Not Another Postponement

When PTI recently asked Transport Minister Pratap Sarnaik about the State Road Safety Council not meeting for more than three years, he assured it would be convened in the first week of July. This assurance is welcome — but it must be understood in the context of a pattern in which the file for convening a meeting of the State Road Safety Council has been described as being in motion for an extended period, with senior officials offering assurances of imminent action that have not materialised into the required statutory meeting.

The July commitment is therefore not merely a scheduling assurance — it is a test of whether Maharashtra's transport ministry understands the seriousness of the governance failure that the 38-month Council silence represents, and whether it is prepared to make the institutional commitments necessary to prevent a recurrence. A single July meeting, convened to discharge the most overdue of statutory obligations, is a necessary beginning — but it is not sufficient. The Council must meet regularly thereafter, at the six-monthly intervals the rules require, and must be given the mandate, the data, and the cross-departmental authority needed to function as the apex road safety governance body it was designed to be.

Maharashtra's road safety crisis is not primarily a resource problem — the Rs 823 crore Road Safety Fund makes that clear. It is primarily a governance problem, manifesting in institutional non-performance, financial underutilisation, and the absence of the coordinated strategic oversight that only a regularly convening State Road Safety Council can provide. The July meeting must mark the beginning of the institutional correction that Maharashtra's 50,000 victims of the past three years deserve, and that the tens of thousands of road users at risk in the years ahead urgently require.