Road Ministry taps IIT-Kanpur to fix 'black spots' on highways to prevent accidents

New Delhi: A steady increase in road accidents since 2021 has prompted the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways to enlist IIT-Kanpur to use artificial intelligence for mapping and analysing high-risk or "black spots" on national highways.

The project aims to help the government identify why certain locations witness repeated collisions and design targeted interventions. Despite several rounds of manual rectification of black spots, India has struggled to curb road crashes, which rose 4% in 2023 from the year before. The ministry identified 13,795 black spots on national highways and a major rectification drive is ongoing.

"The idea now is to use technology to better understand the reasons for frequent accidents in the same spots and accordingly plan for their rectification," a senior government official said, while acknowledging limited success of the previous efforts.


The ministry aims to reduce the number of road accidents in the country to half by 2030 through a multi-pronged approach.

The first draft report of the joint study is expected by the end of this month, the official said.

The study has largely focused on geospatial synchronisation of crash and road data as well as developing the algorithmic pipeline to identify high crash concentration locations for black spots and corridors, IIT-Kanpur director Manindra Agrawal said.

"This will help to identify the dominant crash factors in a given black spot and subsequently link potential countermeasures for black spot beforehand for the consideration of the engineers," Agrawal said.

The idea is to focus on providing more data analytics functionality for users of the iRAD (Integrated Road Accident Database) and eDAR (e-Detailed Accident Report) portal at the central, state and district levels while standardising some of the existing reporting and event spot identification protocols.