Developing a national database of police-reported fatal road traffic crashes for road safety research and management in India

Abstract

Strengthening crash surveillance is an urgent priority for road safety in low- and middle-income countries. We reviewed the online availability and completeness of First Information Reports (FIRs; police reports) of road traffic crashes in India. We developed a relational database to record information extracted from FIRs, and implemented it for one state (Chhattisgarh, 2017–2019). We found that FIRs can be downloaded in bulk from government websites of 15 states and union territories. Another 14 provide access online but restrict bulk downloading, and 7 do not provide online access. For Chhattisgarh, 87% of registered FIRs could be downloaded. Most FIRs reported the date, time, collision-type, and vehicle-types, but important crash characteristics (e.g. infrastructure attributes) were missing. India needs to invest in building the crash surveillance capacity for research and safety management. However, in the interim, maintaining a national database of a sample of FIRs can provide useful policy guidance.

Keywords:

• Fatal road crashes
• police report
• road safety management

Acknowledgements

Professor Dinesh Mohan died in May 2021 due to COVID-19.

Disclosure statement

The authors declare that they have no known competing financial interests or personal relationships that influenced or could have appeared to influence the work reported in this paper.

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the US National Institutes of Health (NIH)/Fogarty grant number R21TW010823.