Accidents across India and their causes.

In India every year 4.8 lakh road accidents take place but where are most of these accidents actually occurring and what are the causes for these accidents. This report will investigate the number of accidents occurring in each state including their severity and the direct and indirect factors causing these accidents. The research question for this report is “Which states have the highest road accidents and what are the factors linked to them.”

For this report I have used 2 datasets which allows me to analyze both qualitative and quantitative data. For the quantitative data I have used a dataset which shows the state-wise number of cases reported and persons injured & died due to road accidents during 2022, this dataset was obtained from data.gov.in which is an official government website that provides data on government related affairs. For the qualitative data I have used the Indian road accident dataset (2022–2025) which was uploaded on kaggle by a

user Mansehaj Preet this dataset provides information about accidents across multiple states the evaluation also considers several key factors: road types, visibility, weather conditions, and the number of lanes. Having qualitative and quantitative data both at large scales one containing information about 4.6 lakh cases and the other giving deep insights on 20000 cases while also being from a similar timeframe makes the data credible and allows data from both datasets to be analyzed together in order to help find patterns and make connections.

The first graph shows in which states the most road accidents occur. This will allow us to understand if there are any specific features such as number of vehicles in states, quality of roads in states and traffic laws in states that affect the number of accidents that occur in each state. From the states with a lower amount of accidents we can understand what measures or solutions have been implemented in order to reduce the number of accidents in other states and help protect and enforce roads from these disasters.

Figure 1

Figure 1 is a geographical representation of the number of accidents reported in Indian states in the year 2022. From this we can observe that most accidents occurred in the states of Tamil Nadu, Madhya Pradesh and Kerala In all of these states over 40 000 accidents occurred in 2022 with 64 000 accidents being reported in Tamil Nadu. All 3 of these states have high populations and vehicle density with 200 to 300 vehicles being owned per 1000 people this combination makes it so that accidents are more likely to occur in these states.

Figure 2

Figure 2 is a bar chart that shows the number of casualties recorded from over 20000 accidents and the direct causes from this graph we can see that there is not one major factor or cause that leads to accidents and there is also no outlier in this data the most common cause shown is bad weather leading to 6953 casualties and on the other end we have some sort of distraction leading to 6856 casualties which is a very small difference for such a large dataset. This showcases that indirect factors are likely to have a greater effect than direct factors.

Figure 3

Figure 3 showcases how many casualties occurred at certain levels of visibility Each of the lines showcases the level of visibility while the X-axis shows at which hour the accidents took place. From this line chart we can understand that during the first few hours of the day after midnight when the visibility is low more accidents occur as the line representing lower levels of visibility is the highest this suggests that at night or early morning accidents occur more frequently due to lower levels of visibility.

Figure 4

Figure 4 shows a line graph of how casualties vary with time in hours. From this graph we can observe that there are 4 main spikes in the number of accidents, these spikes occur at 03:00, 06:00, 12:00 and 19:00. 2 of these spikes occur at the earlier hours of the day this reinforces the idea that the number of accidents that occur due to low visibility during the earlier hours are higher than with better visibility or at other times of the day.

Figure 5

Figure 5 shows a pie chart depicting the relation between accidents and road types. The graph shows that casualties are distributed almost equally across all road types, with each account for 33~34% of the casualties. Since this is close to an equal split this suggests that the road type is not a major factor affecting the accident rates. However, because rural roads generally have less traffic than urban roads and highways, The risk of an accident is actually significantly higher in rural roads. Combined with the fact that rural roads are of a lower quality and poor road conditions are one of the main causes of accidents as highlighted in figure 2 it is likely that the lower quality of roads is the major cause for accidents in rural areas.

Figure 6

Figure 6 is a bar chart that represents the average number of casualties that occur during festive days. From this graph we see that the average number of casualties that occur during festivals such as Eid, new year, Holi and Diwali are greater than the average number of casualties that occur during non festive days. This is likely due to 2 reasons during festive days people like to travel maybe to go to a religious event or to meet relatives this increases the number of people travelling leading to more accidents and specifically during new year people go out to drink alcohol this directly relates with a common cause of accidents highlighted in figure 2 being drunk drivers.

To conclude these datasets have shown that some factors clearly have a more impact on accidents than we believe them to have and some indirect factors that are not always considered correlate with some of the more direct causes such as poor roads and rural areas or festive days and drunk drivers. This also means that yes the direct factors are the main causes of these accidents however it is the combination of the indirect factors such as the visibility levels and the time at which the accidents occur that lead to the direct factors. We can also understand from Figure 1 that some other driving factors for the number of accidents include vehicle density and the sheer number of vehicles in Indian states. The main indirect factors that I have identified are the levels of visibility, the time and the quality of infrastructure. However the true cause for most accidents is the psychology and the skills of the drivers involved in the accidents. These are factors that can not be measured effectively and thus makes it difficult to effectively link the factors that affect accidents to their causes.