Introducing Crashfree India

Over the years, I have noticed something about how we respond to road crashes in India. We treat them as unfortunate, but inevitable. There’s a moment of outrage when it’s in the news and then, life goes on. The problem is, life doesn’t go on for the people who lose someone. And if we are being honest, most of us have.

Whether it’s a colleague, a cousin, a friend from college, or someone on the team, we have all received that message at some point. “Crash. Didn’t make it.” You pause for a minute. Maybe call someone. Then you go back to your meeting. Not because you’re heartless, but because this country has conditioned us to move on.

But the scale of what we are ignoring is too big now.

India has more road fatalities than any other country in the world. Most of them aren’t due to reckless driving. They are due to system failures, poorly designed roads, bad lighting, no signage, no post-crash support and very little accountability. 

When we launched CARS24, the focus was on making it easier to buy and sell vehicles. And over time, we’ve built real scale around that. But somewhere along the way, we realised something was missing. For every family celebrating a car purchase, there is another grieving a loved one lost to the roads.
We saw this. We felt this. And we knew, we couldn’t just keep moving forward without doing something about it. If we’re part of the mobility ecosystem, then we also have to care about what happens after the vehicle is sold.

That’s where Crashfree India comes in.

Crashfree India is a public foundation being launched to take a long-term approach to road safety. It’s not a campaign. It’s not about blame. It’s an infrastructure initiative that works across five fronts: policy, infrastructure, technology, emergency care and public awareness.

In Year 1, we are keeping it simple.

• We are conducting a legal audit of India’s road safety laws, working with over 30 law colleges.
• We are filing RTIs and PILs where needed and building public resources for victims.
• We are launching internships where students identify accident-prone blackspots and submit solutions to local authorities.
• We are launching SafeKart, a curated platform for road safety products.
• We are releasing a Safety API, open-source, so that any app or platform can integrate insights about driving behaviour.
• We are building a network of first responders: auto drivers, delivery staff, shopkeepers, people already present at crash sites who can be trained to assist during the golden hour.
• And we are starting a year-long behavioural campaign to make safety mainstream, especially among young people.

We’ll also be publishing regular reports, on ambulance delays, compensation system failures and challan-based driving insights by region because we believe that what gets measured, gets prioritised.

We are not approaching this with the mindset of “fixing everything.” Road safety in India is a complex, multi-variable problem that will take years to address meaningfully. But someone has to start putting the building blocks together. Not reactively. Not emotionally. Just with clarity and consistency.

If we can help a few cities make data-backed decisions about black spots, if we can reduce response time by five minutes in one neighbourhood, if we can help one victim claim what they’re entitled to—that’s a meaningful start.

There is no big launch event. No major announcement. Just this: we’re starting. Quietly. Properly. Permanently.

Crashfree India isn’t trying to change the world overnight. It’s trying to make sure fewer people leave it too early.