Around 5.20 am on September 20, a BMW carrying four young men was negotiating a curve on Mumbai’s Coastal Road when it lost control, crashed through the roadside barrier and flew off the elevated road, plunging 75 feet onto an under-construction parking lot below. Three students were killed and a fourth was critically injured in the crash near Lotus Jetty, close to Haji Ali.
Police are also probing whether alcohol consumption played a role, while the Regional Transport Office will examine the wrecked vehicle for mechanical failure or human error. “Road design is not something we are investigating. “But the current legal framework lacks teeth to ensure faulty practices are penalised, and there is also a need to increase the capacity of the police and other agencies to apply that law in practice. A stronger penalty means little if a case never reaches the provision.
Police said the BMW appeared to have been travelling at around 120 kmph on the main carriageway, where the speed limit is 80 kmph, although its exact speed will be established during the investigation. However, so far, authorities are not probing whether the curve, or other elements of the road, complied with applicable safety standards, especially if the design could have prevented the automobile from flying and falling 75 feet. Especially since at least 12 crashes have been reported on the 10.58-km road since its inauguration in 2024, resulting in at least seven deaths.
“Investigating officers need to know what road-related evidence must be documented and preserved so that a possible engineering failure can be technically assessed and, where warranted, accountability fixed under Section 198A.
The police have no role in looking into the road or whether there is any fault in its design,” a senior police official investigating the crash said. Tiwari said Indian road-design standards already incorporate the global best-practice principle of “forgiving road design” such as crash barriers, medians and shoulders to reduce the consequences of driver error in Indian road designs. The increase in the statutory penalty through the Jan Vishwas amendment has not necessarily solved that problem, Kumar said, without corresponding capacity among officials documenting and investigating serious crashes. “In at least four states, I have personally spoken to senior police and investigative officers, including senior IPS officers, who had little awareness of Section 198A,” he said. The recent increase in the statutory penalty has not necessarily solved that problem, through the Jan Vishwas Act, he said as it has not been matched by adequate training of police officials to investigate whether faulty road design contributed to a crash. “At least in four states, I have personally spoken to top traffic police officers (senior IPS officers) who claimed they had no knowledge about this,” Kumar said.
Section 135(1A) provides for scientific investigation of road crashes to detect engineering faults, while Sections 210C and 210D deal with road-engineering standards to be issued by the Union and state governments. “But the majority of states have not even issued rules for Section 135(1A) scientific crash investigation, and the majority of states have not issued rules around 210D. Tewari said the Supreme Court has now directed states to frame rules under Section 135(1A), and expressed hope that they would be notified within the next year.
For Section 198A to be applied, Piyush Tewari, founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation, explained investigators first need a scientific mechanism to establish whether engineering faults contributed to a crash and that mechanism sits across three provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act. Without those rules, the evidentiary chain becomes difficult to complete, with investigators having to establish how a road may have been unsafe, and which prescribed standard was violated and how that violation contributed to death or disability. The problem therefore moves beyond the size of the penalty to the architecture needed to invoke it.
The Union has only given a small reference to IRC codes in 210C, which is not comprehensive enough,” Tewari said.
