Each Union Budget promises faster growth through new highways and economic corridors. Yet this asphalt boom has spawned a parallel epidemic of road deaths that quietly eats away at those gains. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH)’s 2023 data show India now sees roughly 55 crashes and 20 deaths every hour – more than any other country.National Highways and expressways constitute a minor portion of the network but involve high speed, so every mistake here is deadly and they thus account for almost 30% of all road deaths. They have emerged as areas of extreme danger to the level that Constitutional courts have had to constitutionalise what should have been routine administration.In its recent suo motu response in in Re: Phalodi Accident, following two atrocious accidents in Rajasthan and Telangana in November, the Supreme Court decided the right to safe passage to be an enforceable aspect of Article 21, and provided a 13-point roadmap prohibiting unauthorised parking lay-overs and dhabas on high-speed corridors and requiring blackspot rectification within a fixed deadline, amongst other things.This decision contributes to previous jurisprudence: the closing of liquor vends around highways and, in S. Rajaseekaran v. Union of India (2025), the acknowledgement of pedestrian rights on roads, of design standards, guidance on helmets, wrong-side driving, hooters and high-beam LED lights.However, when the cost of crashes is 3.14% of GDP, can courts secure the right to safe passage without sound multi-factor epidemiology, fair liability apportionment and genuinely scientific, rights-aware crash investigations?‘Human error’ as a convenient legal fictionAfter almost every crash, the legal script is familiar. Police register an FIR for rash or negligent driving (for which lesser punishment is prescribed), typically against identified or unidentified drivers, based on statements from injured persons or grieving families. The MoRTH statistics then fault 78.4% of highway crashes to the carelessness of the driver, and say over-speeding causes approximately 68% of deaths.This narrative is apparently incomplete. The India Status Report on Road Safety series prepared by IIT Delhi’s Transportation Research and Injury Prevention Programme (TRIPP) indicates that police statistics do not have the forensic ability to record geometric and design flaws.A 2026 joint report by MoRTH and the SaveLIFE Foundation found that 59% of fatal crashes occurred without any traffic violations at the point of impact, indicating thereby that road engineering, infrastructure gaps and other non‑driver factors, rather than only driver misconduct, were often the decisive factors.The 78.4% human error figure is thus a concern among experts. It may hide systemic engineering and governance failures: lack of or poor signage, potholing or uneven carriageways, unscientific or damaged barriers, inadequate lighting, unscientific speed breakers, high medians with no safe median crossings, poor pedestrian facilities, and dangerous entry/exit cuts.To these can be added lax policing of mixed traffic and two-wheelers along fast corners, lack of specialised highway policing, lack of hospital preparedness, slow ambulances and sluggish good samaritan responses – all of which make the landscape much more complicated than one than marked just by rash driving.Contractors and road-owning authorities are seldom involved as culpable parties or subject to scrutiny; failure in design and maintenance is underreported and the blame is accredited to the drivers and to the victims.Weak investigation apparatusAccording to the TRIPP-IIT Delhi’s India Status Report on Road Safety series, the Indian road safety database is systematically under-reporting on non-driving factors and vulnerable road users as a result of its strong dependence on police FIRs to drive crash statistics. These FIRs are often founded on eyewitness or survivor reports and are unlikely to rely upon multi-disciplinary contributions by road engineers, vehicle inspectors or trauma specialists, which makes it simpler to attribute car accidents to human error and more difficult to notice design and infrastructure failures.The lack of a uniformly applied, national guideline on scientific road-crash investigations by the local police, involving standardised analysis and data handling, persists in India and it is a challenge to be able to effectively evaluate what safety interventions are actually effective. Under-reporting keeps the problem on the political and administrative backburner.Investigations are more inclined towards framing charges instead of actual road vehicle-behaviour investigation. The relatively minor accidents, single-vehicle accidents or accidents that involve pedestrians and two wheelers are not well documented or even recorded on high-speed expressways.The comprehensive road safety manuals made by the Indian Road Congress are not being implemented much by National Highways Development Project (NHDP) and non-NHDP networks, despite the push by the Supreme Court Committee on Road Safety to have multi-agency investigations involving the transport, police and public works departments.Capacity gaps further worsen the crisis. Police and regional transport departments have a limited number of staff to conduct inspections and investigate in a district.The outcome is an investigation system which structurally cannot provide the forensic truth that a fundamental right requires and where, in some instances, forensic frauds are also observed because of tampering with the vehicle inspection mechanism.Data credibilityThe majority of statistics about accidents are the ones provided by the police or FIRs. Under-reporting is high particularly in rural India, where there is a lack of trust in the police and many cases of minor accidents or late fatalities do not make it to the record books. MoRTH itself has indicated in its Road Accidents in India report that a death occurring more than 30 days after a crash is not recorded as a road traffic fatality.The WHO in its 2019 Global Health Estimates report rated India’s official data on road fatalities as unusable or unavailable due to its quality problems. A rights-based approach requires data on and from various sources: Dial 112 calls, police, ambulance services, highways, concessionaries, hospital trauma as well as bystanders.In this direction, MoRTH developed the Integrated Road Accident Database – now upgraded to the e-Detailed Accident Report India – to store geo-tagged, multi-agency crash data, but its rollout has been spotty. Its adoption by states is uneven, the quality of data varies, and integration of stakeholders is only partial and enforcement very uneven.Without an effective, multi-source crash database, courts and policymakers cannot trustfully observe trends, evaluate timely interventions or hold specific agencies to account. That right to a safe passage thereby runs the danger of becoming normatively full but operationally empty.What a rights-based enforcement agenda needs to look likeIf we take the Supreme Court’s ‘right to safe passage’ seriously, some reforms are constitutionally necessary and not just desirable.First, India requires a logical, consistent policy for speed limits based on road usage and land use, for access restrictions to expressways, and for regular re-training of and licence renewal for commercial drivers that is enforced by the advanced traffic management system. There should also be sufficient lay-bys and systematic blackspot corrections.Second, dedicated highway and expressway police wings, or specialised units within available forces are required. In areas with long highway corridors, the police ought to be engaged on identified crash-prone areas using basic predictive and scientific methods that rely on historical crash data, supported by ring-fenced traffic budgets.Third, as TRIPP-IIT Delhi and the Citizen Consumer and Civic Action Group reveal that police reports are often incomplete on details and scientific analysis, and that the police is rarely supported by specialised training in road design or crash reconstruction to document design or infrastructure faults, India requires standardised, multi-disciplinary forensic crash investigation groups to investigate serious and fatal crashes using on-scene reconstruction, vehicle forensics, post-crash trauma audits and clear fixation of criminal liability against the real perpetrators.India made a commitment at the 2020 Global Stockholm Conference to reduce road killings and injuries by half by 2030 and MoRTH is considering intelligent transport systems such as V2V communications and network survey vehicles to aid this ambition.The April 2026 order is consistent with this trend, yet without multi‑disciplinary investigations, open data dashboards and independent audits, the roadmap will keep hitting weak data and weak accountability – the real hurdle for India’s law enforcement.O.P. Singh is a former DGP of Uttar Pradesh and is president of the Indian Police Foundation. Himanshu Dixit is a Delhi-based lawyer and an alumnus of NLIU Bhopal and ILI New Delhi.