With single data source, India tends to underreport road crash deaths

India banks solely on the police force for this data, ignoring other critical sources

India banks solely on police data for estimating deaths in road accidents, ignoring other critical sources, leading to a data gap that impairs its emergency response system, makes it difficult to design and implement accident prevention strategies, and
leads to an underestimation of accidental deaths, experts say.

The World Health Organization (WHO) classified India's official data on road traffic fatalities as "unusable" or "unavailable" because of "quality issues" in its 2019 Global Health Estimates released in December 2020. This study is still the latest available source of global data on death and disability by region, country, age, sex and cause.