Press Release

NHAI Carries Out Extensive Road Safety Audits to Enhance Road Safety

New Delhi, 13 January 2023: Observing ‘Road Safety Week’, NHAI has been working on
assessment of various safety measures on National Highways to make them safer. NHAI
has laid down extensive policy procedures for carrying out Road Safety Audit and
responsibilities has been earmarked for all stakeholders for facilitating the audit and for
the implementation of the recommendations.

NHAI has been conducting safety audits on National Highways at the planning,
construction, operations, and maintenance stages. During FY 2021-22, NHAI undertook
safety audit of 16,500 km of National Highways through safety auditors specialized in safe
roads engineering studies and safety audit of 19,300 km has been completed during this
financial year till December 2022.

To ensure implementation of recommendation of Safety Audit, a web-based portal (Data

Lake) has been developed at NHAI and 260 safety audit reports have been uploaded by
the safety consultants on Data Lake and are monitored for implementation by NHAI.

In addition, NHAI has made Third Party Road Safety Audit at Detailed Project Report
(DPR) stage mandatory for all the projects. DPR for all new projects will be safety audited
by a team of independent Safety Consultants, and the recommendations of the safety
auditors will be taken into account during subsequent stages of design. Further, the safety
review of the DPRs is undertaken by dedicated road safety officers at NHAI to ensure
that all the necessary safety measures have been incorporated.

Improvement of junctions and provision of traffic calming measures where National

Highways pass through habitations is also being undertaken systematically based on
safety audits and accident data.

In FY 2021-22, Safety mitigation measures have been undertaken on 6,179 locations and
2,015 locations in the current FY 2022-23. Safety was improved at the junctions by
installing lighting, road signs, safety barriers, pedestrian guard rails, rumble strips, speed
humps on crossroads, speed cushions, transverse bar markings etc. to regulate and
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streamline traffic flow. NHAI has initiated installation of Traffic Impact Attenuators to
mitigate the severity of accidents with roadside hazards along National Highways.

Construction of passenger cross movement facility in rural areas on the completed 4/6
lane National Highways has also been initiated. Also, safe passenger crossing facilities
such as Foot Over Bridges, Pedestrian Underpass, Pedestrian Subway, and Vehicular
under pass has been provided at various locations across the country.

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