In her work for us on road accidents, my colleague Nileena Suresh found that the number of annual fatalities from road accidents in India is likely heavily underestimated. The impact also seems to fall disproportionately on one group of people in particular - young men.
India reported 160,000 fatalities from road accidents in 2019, but the government is aware that this number, which comes from police records, is an undercount. "For instance, fatalities that occur in hospitals after 30 days often go unrecorded on account of a lack of linkage between police and hospital records. Additionally, the [former] Indian Penal Code does not allow charges against inanimate objects, resulting in unreported cases where no responsible human is identified. These inconsistencies in reporting can lead to inaccuracies in identifying the cause of death, the victim, and the vehicle involved," Nileena writes, citing a government report. She uses estimates from another government source - the Sample Registration System's estimates of causes of death - to find that the true count of deaths from road accidents could be twice as high.
Road accidents disproportionately affect young men, Nileena finds; they are the leading cause of mortality among men aged 15-29, responsible for more than one-quarter of the deaths every year in this age group. Road accidents account for more than twice as many deaths among young men as cardiovascular disease and more than six times as many deaths as cancer in this age group.
Two aspects of Nileena's reporting in particular stood out to me: the first was that in about 50,000 of the 75,000 reported fatalities involving two-wheelers, the victims were not wearing helmets, and the second that 17,000 of 21,000 four-wheeler reported accident deaths involved individuals who were not wearing seat belts.
The tragic big shift that we've seen thus far with road accidents has been its rising impact on the lives of young men. Seeing a decline in this, hopefully driven by an increase in helmet and seatbelt usage, would be the big shift we'd like to see.
