10% of global road crash victims are from India: World Bank

India, which has one percent of the world''s vehicles, accounts for 10 percent of all road crash victims, the latest World Bank report on road safety said on Saturday.

Hartwig Schafer, World Bank's Vice President for South Asia, said the Indian government in recent years has taken significant steps to address the issues related to road safety.

"For India, it's one percent of the world's vehicles and 10 percent of the crash victims. This is something where, in particular in India, we have to pay attention," Schafer told in an interview on the occasion of the release of the report on road safety in New Delhi on Saturday. While the attention in the last year has shifted due to COVID-19, there is an interesting link between road safety and pandemic right now, he noted.

"Unfortunately, the road crashes have not been going down and any time 10 percent of the capacity in hospitals is being used for the treatment crash victims," he said.

Schafer said road crashes actually hit the poorest and the most vulnerable segments of the populations.

"The financial impact of the crash is much more on poorer households than on better-off households. It is much higher on women who have to take care of the burden of caregiving. It is much higher on those who rely on foot and also in the informal sector," he said.

However, according to Schafer, the good thing is that India was doing quite a bit on road safety.

Last year, India amended its Motor Vehicle (Amendment) Act, which is "bringing a lot of innovation" in terms of financing, protection and enforcement to the fore, he said. Emergency health care facilities in the vicinity of highways make a huge difference in addressing the challenge of road safety.

"When we plan highways now, we need to make sure that crash victims are getting care within the first hour of the crash. That very often makes the difference between life and death," he said.

Highway corridors in India that have a very coordinated healthcare and emergency health care of access, in terms of hospitals, trauma centres for emergency treatment, make a huge difference in terms of whether a crash victim recovers or passes away, he added.

Indian roads witness 415 deaths per day in accidents, the highest in the world, Union Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari said last month.

According to the Road Accident Report for 2019, a total number of 449,002 accidents took place in India during the calendar year 2019, leading to 151,113 deaths and 451,361 injuries.