Chandrakant Lahariya | Right To Return Home Alive: Killer Roads a Growing Menace in India

On the first Sunday of July, I lost a dear friend, Dr Biplab Mukhopadhyay, 43, a gifted laparoscopic gynaecological surgeon, to a tragic road traffic accident in Delhi. He had spent the day doing what he was trained to do: saving lives. After completing a successful surgery, he stepped out of the hospital and began crossing a road in New Delhi’s Chattarpur area, when a speeding motorcycle struck him. He was rushed to the emergency room in hospital but did not survive.

I had known Biplab for only three years. Yet friendship is not always measured in calendar time. Some people take decades to enter our inner lives; others arrive quietly through meetings, brief conversations and small acts of warmth. He had that rare gift: a gentle presence. Whenever we met, there was a smile, a brief conversation, perhaps a joke, and the assumption that there would always be another meeting. That Sunday afternoon, I had seen him at an academic gathering. By late evening, the news arrived that he was gone.

For India, Biplab will become one more road-traffic fatality. For his wife, children, family, patients and friends, he will never be a number. He is a life interrupted, a chair left empty, a familiar voice silenced.

The distance between a statistic and a human life helps explain why India has tolerated its road- safety crisis for so long. In 2024, India officially recorded nearly 4.88 lakh road crashes. They killed 177,177 people: about 485 deaths every day, or more than twenty every hour. These numbers, already staggering, tell only part of the story. Road crashes do not merely kill. They disable as well.

A survivor may leave a trauma ward with a spinal injury, brain damage, an amputation, visual loss, chronic pain or cognitive impairment. The burden of road trauma is counted not only in funerals but in lost livelihoods, interrupted education, depleted savings, dependence and years of healthy life lost.

This is why the Supreme Court’s judgment of June 19, 2026 matters. By recognising the right to walk, including the right to safe and demarcated footpaths, as a fundamental right, the court did more than settle a legal dispute. In India, our cities have been designed as though roads belong first to cars and vehicles and pedestrians must bargain for whatever remains. The court’s proposition is simple: mobility cannot be measured only by how rapidly cars travel. A decent city must also ask whether a child can walk safely, whether an elderly person can cross without fear, and whether a wheelchair user can move independently.

But while courts can declare rights; only the governments can free up the pavements for the public.

Speeding, drunk driving, red-light jumping, wrong-side driving and failure to use helmets or seat belts cannot remain offences enforced mainly through occasional campaigns. Missing footpaths, unsafe crossings, dark stretches, dangerous junctions and recurrent crash locations should be identified and repaired against deadlines.

Ambulance speed, trained first responders, rational trauma-referral networks and functional trauma centres often determine whether a victim dies, survives with severe disability or returns to ordinary life.

The medium-term task is harder: redesign the system itself.

People make mistakes: drivers misjudge speed, children move unpredictably, older people walk slowly, and riders lose balance. The answer is safer design: continuous footpaths, protected cycle lanes, frequent crossings, refuge islands, traffic calming, safer junctions, good lighting, corrected black spots, appropriate speeds, and faster emergency care when crashes occur.

This is the essence of the safe system approach: people will make mistakes, but ordinary mistakess hould not carry a death sentence. Roads, speeds, vehicles and institutions must be designed to absorb error. The key challenge is cultural.

India must abandon the idea that a good road is simply one on which vehicles move fast. Speed has become the vanity metric of transport policy. Flyovers, expressways and widened carriageways are visible achievements; a safe crossing or intact pavement is less photogenic. Yet civilisation is often revealed by the infrastructure it builds for the slowest person, not the fastest machine.

Sweden’s Vision Zero began with an ethical proposition: no death or serious injury on the road is acceptable. Its significance lay not in imagining that people would stop making mistakes, but in refusing to make individuals carry the entire burden of a system’s failures. Road users had responsibilities; but so did road designers, vehicle manufacturers, enforcement agencies and governments. Geography, density and traffic patterns differ. But the principle still travels well: road deaths fall when societies stop describing them as inevitable accidents and start treating them as preventable system failures.

That shift requires political leadership, stronger city governments, better crash data, independent safety audits, accountable road agencies and transport policy that gives walking, cycling and public transport the seriousness reserved for motorised traffic.

We have become accustomed to road deaths because they arrive one by one. There is no single national catastrophe, only a steady accumulation of private grief: a student on a scooter, a labourer walking home, a family on a motorcycle, a child going to school, a pedestrian crossing a road, a doctor returning from work.

Each disappears into a spreadsheet. Until one of them is someone you know. Then the number acquires a face, a voice, a family, a history. You remember the last conversation. You replay the last meeting. Biplab’s death has done that for me. The real test of a modern nation is not whether its roads can allow people to move faster. It is whether those roads allow people to reach home alive.

Rest in peace, dear Biplab.