India’s highway to developed nation status by 1947 seems paved with traffic perils

Every evening, on the exit from Sector 37 in Faridabad onto the KMP expressway, cars come at me the wrong way. It is not the odd reckless driver, but the apparent norm. This is so at every exit, where the road layout offers no safe option. Crashes are frequent; I read of them almost daily, a steady drip of dread.

One was reported by The Tribune on 28 November 2025. On a service road in Faridabad linked to the Delhi-Mumbai Expressway, a sedan returning from a wedding made a U-turn under a flyover near Sector 14; a speeding SUV slammed into it, and Mahesh, a workshop operator, died on the spot.

Here is the contradiction of our moment. We are aiming for Viksit Bharat—or developed-country status—by 2047, yet what unfolds daily on Indian roads is a story of regression over progress, a country slipping backward one avoidable death at a time.

None of this is bad luck. NH-148NA, a spur that takes Delhi and Noida traffic through Faridabad to the expressway, was designed without asking how local residents would use it. Where colonies open onto it, the exits are either misplaced or missing, so a driver gets on, finds no exit and doubles back into oncoming traffic. Thoughtless road design did not just permit fatalities, it has made them predictable.

A flyover in Badarpur shows both halves of a concrete failure. On one side, flawed design and absent management turn it into a daily nightmare. The two-wheelers and auto-rickshaws that it bars ride on it anyway; this rule goes unenforced, even though toll-collection never misses.

On the other, the project’s blueprint was never followed. Promised underpasses for border-bound buses, walkways for pedestrians and last-mile links were left unbuilt. Half-dug pits beneath the flyover are now garbage dumps that mock the slogan of ‘Swachh Bharat.’

The story goes beyond the National Capital Region. Bengaluru’s Peenya flyover on a national highway was shut to heavy vehicles for nearly three years after its cables corroded, while an Ejipura flyover due in 2019 remains only on paper.

National highways account for a little over 2% of India’s total road length, but, according to an IIT Delhi estimate, they see a third of all accidents and over a third of all road deaths. In 2024 alone, 52,609 people died on our national highways. These highways reportedly drew toll revenues of around ₹75,000 crore in 2025-26 and could cross the ₹1 trillion mark this fiscal year.

Road safety, though, seems like a lost cause. The failures are no secret. In 2024, India’s minister of road transport and highways had said there was no justification for tolls collected for roads in poor condition and asked officials to be sensitive to the woes of road users. Yet, nothing seems to change.

A network that leaves about 180,000 Indians dead every year is an economic wound as much as a moral one. It is as if road planners and builders see exits where people live as fringe elements that deserve little urgency.

The remedy is not more concrete and asphalt, but a whole new way of building and managing roads. Road construction is big business for contractors and the officials who clear their bills. The Comptroller and Auditor General has found inflated costs, falsified documents and funds diverted from escrow accounts; the Public Accounts Committee heard the chairman of the National Highways Authority of India admit design flaws that led to the collapsed of new highway in Kerala.

The defects appear to multiply; we lay more kilometres than ever and regress in quality. Payment must follow performance, with money withheld and liability fixed whenever a faulty report or known defect results in lives lost.

Building, though, is only half the task, and we have abandoned the other half. We barely maintain what we build. Speed limits are set by inertia, so traffic often crawls at 30kmph on an open expressway. Speed signs should be dynamic, with traffic conditions dictating upper limits within a safety range.

Highway policing needs attention too. It has turned episodic and extractive, ready to wave through those who pay and fine those who cannot, while wrong-way driving and unfit vehicles run unchecked.

Clearly, we need a revolution in traffic management: automated, camera-based enforcement immune to cash, a designated officer accountable for every accident-prone spot, and no toll charges for a new road until an independent audit clears it.

We are told to drive safely, but no one can drive their way out of this. On a road built without thought, its rules unenforced and its traffic unmanaged, even a careful driver can turn reckless. The irony is that road users fund this network. Every toll collected is from one of us and so is every road-crash fatality.

A developed India by 2047 cannot be built on roads that leave a trail of death. That would demand roads that are designed and built well, priced by their performance and governed by good sense. Traffic rules must be enforced as if lives depend on it, because they do. Anything less is not progress towards 2047. It is a nation paving its own road to ruin.

These are the author’s personal views.

The author is a financial management specialist and CFO, Council on Energy, Environment and Water.