The Indian Road Assessment Programme, IndiaRAP, launched in 2017 and hosted by AITD, draws on local technical expertise and research from key national stakeholders including the Government road development agencies, and India’s top road research and educational institutes. India is investing in large-scale road upgrades across the country and iRAP estimates that road crashes cost India more than 3% of national GDP each year. Maximizing the safety of this investment will deliver additional economic benefits to the country.

Road safety has now been included among the Sustainable Development Goal (3.6) by the United Nations. Improving India’s roads to a 3-star or better standard is a key to achieve the SDG target of halving the road deaths and injuries. Many countries are setting targets to increase the percentage of travel on 3-star or better roads. IndiaRAP is actively engaging with Government road agencies and multilateral development banks to advocate for safer roads and measurable safety targets in terms of Star Rating. This will help the government to adopt a powerful metric to specify and track road safety performance at the network and project level, which will help reduce road trauma in India.

Under the program, over 45,000 km of roads already assessed which involved systematic data collection, measuring 50+ road infrastructe attributes for every 100 m road length and generating Star Rating which is the global benchmark to measure road infrastructure safety. A USD$1 billion Programme for Strengthening Road Safety supported by World Bank, ADB and the Government includes iRAP metrics to identify high-risk roads. Recently in the states of Himachal Pradesh and Karnataka, teams of consultants used iRAP Star Rating to assess the road network over 7,000 km and 17,000 km respectively. The assessment and its outcome led to prioritization of the road network for implementation of safety treatments in the next 5 years.

This paper aims to present the way iRAP Star Rating is being used as a matrix to measure road infrastructure safety sharing the outcomes from various projects in India.