Road safety project: Govt piloting Cibil-like rating for licenced drivers

Ratings to be offered to insurers and OEMs to enable them to customise premiums based on driving behaviour, incentives on new vehicle purchases

The government is piloting a programme to offer Cibil-like ratings for drivers, based on how safely they negotiate their vehicles.

The plan is to offer the ratings of drivers to insurers, which can then customise their premiums-–a higher score meaning a lower premium, for instance, and vice-versa. It is also looking at offering ratings to original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), which can use the scores to offer special incentives to licensed drivers when they come to buy other vehicles in the future.

The licensed drivers under the programme would be those who ride or drive two-, three- and four-wheelers including passenger cars, buses and other commercial vehicles, both ICE and electric.

Cibil ratings currently determine the credit worthiness of an individual, and have been used extensively by banks and NBFCs to offer credit to consumers across segments, from housing to household products. The driver ratings would replicate this model to some extent.

The programme is being led by Ease of Doing Business (EODB), a tech piloting agency for the government, along with the World Economic Forum (WEF), which had initiated the Road Safety 2.0  programme headed by Akhilesh Srivastav, a key member of the National Highway for Electric Vehicles knowledge group under EODB. Once the pilot is tested and successful, EODB will play an enabling role in pushing it across the country.

The focus of the WEF programme is to use technology to compensate for human limitations in a move that could drastically improve the dismal record of road safety in India. According to the World Road Safety Report, in 2018, India ranked first among 199 countries in the number of road fatalities.

Says Abhijeet Sinha, National programme director of Ease of Doing Business: “The idea is to encourage and incentivise safe driving in the country. And we can do that by creating a Cibil-like rating for drivers, based on various data sources. This can be valuable information for insurance companies and OEMs, for instance. It will, of course, require OEMs to also play a role.”      

While the modalities to get the pilot project are still being worked out, Sinha says the data about how a driver is performing will be collected from various sources. These include the government record of challans against the licensee, and data from roads on which cameras are installed to capture vehicle movement.

However the OEMs also have to be roped into the scheme. Sinha says vehicles will be required to install sensors to collect driving data,-which might add a small cost to their purchase price. It will need an advanced driver assistance system (ADAS) that essentially not only aids the driver in negotiating the roads (warning on a blind spot coming, adaptive cruise control night vision, etc) but also takes pictures of the individual at the wheel. The idea is to ensure the person at the wheel is validated as the one on the licence document.

While these systems are standard on electric vehicles, they might not be present in ICE vehicles though passenger cars that still run on petrol and diesel are increasingly incorporating technology, with many already having fixed sensors in their models.       

How to keep roads safe: Govt's new pilot project

Drivers with high ratings of safe driving to be offered lower premium by insurance companies

OEMs to incentivise drivers with good ratings when they buy new vehicles

OEMs will need to install sensors to collect data of drivers

ADAS system needs to validate that the driver behind the wheel is the same as the one in the licence document.

Once pilot project is done, Ease of Doing Business will take it across the country