Every year, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways publishes its road accident report. Every year, the numbers are staggering enough to numb most people into inaction. In 2023, India recorded 4,80,583 road accidents and 1,72,890 fatalities, the highest ever on record. That works out to 20 deaths every hour, every single day of the year.

Source: Road Accidents in India 2023, MoRTH

But here's the figure that should make every EHS leader stop and sit with it: 83.4% of those fatalities were people in the working-age group of 18–60 years. Not retirees. Not children. Working adults, the same demographic that fills your offices, drives your field teams, and travels in your company cabs.

And yet, in boardroom after boardroom across Corporate India, road safety is still treated as someone else's problem. A government problem. An infrastructure problem. A traffic enforcement problem.

It isn't. It is yours.

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The Government Is Doing Its Part. But It Has Limits.

To be fair to the state: MoRTH has made road safety a genuine policy priority. Road safety audits on National Highways are now mandatory at all stages; design, construction, operation, and maintenance, through third-party auditors. The Supreme Court of India has its own Committee on Road Safety. There are Vision Zero targets, the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act 2019, revised accident reporting formats, and structured compensation frameworks.

Progress at the state level is real. Provisional 2024 data show nine states, including Gujarat, Haryana, and Punjab, recorded declines in both accidents and fatalities. That matters.

Source: MoRTH provisional road accident data 2024 (note: West Bengal data pending; inclusion may revise national totals)

But here is what government policy will never be able to do: it cannot tell your employee not to take a call on the highway after a long client dinner. It cannot stop your field sales executive from speeding on NH48 because they're running late for a quarterly review. It cannot enforce a seatbelt policy inside your company-contracted cab. And it cannot audit whether your transport vendor screened the driver ferrying your team home at midnight.

Only you can do that. And if you're not doing it, you are, consciously or by default, leaving your people exposed.

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The Liability Gap No One Talks About

Indian corporates have developed a peculiar blind spot when it comes to road risk. We have robust frameworks for fire safety, chemical handling, working at heights, and electrical hazards. But road safety, which kills and injures more working-age adults than almost any other occupational risk category, barely features in most EHS programs.

This isn't just a moral failure. It's a legal and financial one.

Under the Employees' Compensation Act, 1923, employers are liable for injuries or deaths that arise out of and in the course of employment, and the Supreme Court has explicitly extended this to work-related commutes. The Fatal Accidents Act, 1855 allows the legal representatives of a deceased worker to pursue claims against an employer for death resulting from wrongful act, neglect, or default. Indian courts have consistently held that an employee's contributory negligence does not absolve the employer where an identifiable breach of duty can be established.

The Motor Vehicles Act compounds this further. Under Section 164 of the Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act 2019, the owner of a motor vehicle, which in fleet scenarios is your company, is liable to pay fixed compensation of ₹5,00,000 in cases of death, without the claimant being required to prove any wrongful act, neglect, or default on the owner's part. The liability is no fault. The principle is unambiguous: if your vehicle is involved in an accident, you answer it.

Source: Section 164, Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019; Fatal Accidents Act, 1855

Walk into most Indian corporates today and ask for their driver vetting protocol, their vendor road safety audit checklist, their employee defensive driving training records, or their near-miss reporting system for road incidents. You will typically be met with silenceor a blank look.

The gap between legal exposure and actual preparedness is enormous. Most organizations are one serious accident away from a crisis they are entirely unprepared for.

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"But We Have Insurance." That's Not a Safety Program.

Insurance pays out after the harm has occurred, after the family has been devastated, after the reputational damage has spread, after your employees have started asking whether the organization that sends them onto dangerous roads values their safety.

Insurance also has hard limits. If a driver is found to have been operating under the influence, without a valid license, or in a vehicle with deferred maintenance, the insurer has grounds to contest or recover the payout from the registered owner. Which is you.

The safety case and the business case for corporate road safety point in exactly the same direction: build the system before you need it.

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What a Serious Corporate Road Safety Program Actually Covers

A road safety audit is not a tick-box exercise done once a year. In its proper form, it is a systematic, recurring evaluation of every element of road risk that your organization creates or is exposed to, the vehicular equivalent of a fire safety audit. Methodical, documented, and acted upon.

For a mature EHS program, this covers six interconnected domains.

Driver assessment and vetting goes well beyond checking for a valid license. It means evaluating driving history, assessing risk profiles, screening for substance use, and establishing clear criteria for who is, and is not permitted to operate vehicles on behalf of the organization. This applies to your employees and, critically, to your transport vendors' drivers.

Vehicle standards and maintenance require documented inspection schedules covering brakes, tyres, lighting, and steering on structured rolling cycles, not annually. Many road-related accidents in India are not caused by reckless driving; they are caused by mechanical failures that were entirely predictable and preventable.

Route and journey risk assessment recognizes that not all roads carry equal risk. MoRTH data shows that national and state highways, less than 5% of India's total road network, account for over 59% of all fatalities. Certain routes, night journeys, and monsoon-season trips carry dramatically elevated risk profiles. A structured EHS program maps these and makes deliberate decisions about timing, mode of transport, and sometimes whether a journey should happen at all.

Source: Road Accidents in India 2023, MoRTH

Driver training and behavioral programs are among the highest-impact interventions available. Over speeding alone accounted for 68.1% of all road fatalities in India in 2023, a human behavior problem, not a road design problem. Defensive driving training, fatigue management education, and structured coaching on high-risk behaviors produce measurable reductions in incident rates when applied consistently.

Source: Road Accidents in India 2023, MoRTH

Incident reporting and near-miss capture is where most corporate road safety programs fall shortest. The organisations with the best safety records don't just track fatalities and serious injuries; they systematically capture near-misses, the moments when something almost went wrong. On the road, these moments are happening constantly and going unreported: the driver who ran an amber light at 80 kmph because the sales manager was calling to ask where he was, the cab that swerved to avoid a pothole and nearly clipped a two-wheeler, the field executive who drove four hours straight after a late-night client dinner and nodded off briefly on the highway. None of these made it into any report. None of them triggered a review. But every one of them was a fatality that didn't happen, yet. That data is an early warning system. It tells you where risk is accumulating before it becomes a tragedy. But only if you build a system where drivers and employees feel safe enough to report it without fear of blame.

Vendor and contractor oversight remains the most neglected dimension of corporate road safety in India. Outsourcing employee transport does not outsource your duty of care. Your vendor's driver, operating your contracted cab, carrying your employee, is your risk. Auditing transport vendors on driver screening, vehicle maintenance records, incident history, and safety training protocols is not an optional extra. It is foundational.

Stop Waiting for a Mandate. Build Your Own Standard.

The organizations leading on road safety in India; across pharmaceuticals, FMCG, and infrastructure, did not wait for a regulatory mandate. They recognized that the road is an extension of the workplace. They built their own standards. They trained their people. They audited their vendors. They tracked their data.

The results follow. Companies with structured road safety programs report fewer accidents, lower insurance claims, reduced operational downtime, and most importantly, employees who arrive home at the end of the day.

This is not an argument for compliance. Meeting regulatory requirements means you've done the least the law asks of you. This is an argument about the kind of EHS program you want to run. Do you send people onto some of the world's most dangerous roads with nothing more than a cab booking confirmation? Or do you send them with confidence that you have done everything within your power to bring them back safely?

MoRTH data tells us 20 people die on Indian roads every hour. Statistically, several of them were on their way to or from work when it happened. The question every EHS leader must answer is whether their program acknowledged that or looked the other way.

Ready to build a road safety program that matches your duty of care? Book a demo with SafetyConnect

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