 Yamuna Expressway, or Taj Expressway, is a six-lane, 165-kilometer-long stretch, connecting Greater Noida with Agra in the state of Uttar Pradesh. It is one of India's longest six-lane expressway stretches. The total project cost was Rs. 128 billion. This expressway was implemented by the JP Group in 2012. July 8, 2019, 29 people died in an accident on the Yamuna expressway and 23 others were left injured. The accident took place when an Uttar Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation bus hit a divider and fell through a gap between two flyovers. The statistics of accidents and the deaths in these accidents are becoming a major concern for the authorities. This year alone, 95 accidents have been reported on the expressway in which 94 people have died and 120 were severely injured. An RTI file by RTI activist and lawyer KC Jain revealed that from 2012 to 2018, 4,956 accidents took place on this road in which 781 people died and 7,671 were injured. Newsclick spoke to D. Raghunandan, who closely follows issues of road safety for the Delhi Science Forum. You better understand the intensity of and core reasons behind these accidents. So India has one of the highest accident rates in the world, particularly on fatalities, deaths arising out of road accidents. These statistics get even worse when you think of number of accidents or fatalities per say 100,000 kilometers of road or in comparison with density of traffic. That is to say countries with far more dense traffic with a lot more kilometers of roads have much lower incidents of crashes on the road and particularly of deaths on the road. Now this is broadly speaking for a combination of reasons mostly interlinked with each other. The first is the poor engineering of roads meaning most Indian roads including on major highways, state highways, national highways don't have even dividers in the roads which means you are exposing traffic to oncoming traffic, to incoming traffic facing each other and that would then pose the problem of increased chances of road accidents. Then you have the endemic Indian problem of complete non-compliance with traffic rules by people, people driving on the wrong side of the road, people coming in from side roads on to main roads and a very complex mix of vehicles in roads ranging from extremely slow animal driven carts to bicycles, two-wheelers, three-wheelers, trucks, buses, etc. all mostly plying on fairly narrow roads. Some of this is sought to be tackled in the big highways by fordlaining which will include having dividers and so on but the fundamental problems have not changed. Complete lack of obedience and compliance with traffic rules, poor engineering of roads and it must be added very low skills and poor training of drivers. Most drivers in our country get licenses without having to go through any tests or even if a simple test is done then there is no rigor in testing whether you know how to drive well or not, whether you are complying with road traffic rules or not which then compounds to the problems that we are talking about. Now if you combine all these factors with the Yamuna Expressway project which seemingly has overcome at least the engineering problems of roads, fact is it has not. You have allowed extremely high speeds on the Yamuna Expressway and today I saw in the newspapers that minister Gadkari has said that speed is not the problem on the highways. That would be true if all other things were okay such as the Expressway does not have crash bars on its side, does not prevent vehicles from traversing the margins of the road and in circumstances where you have poor driving by drivers, extra speed compounds mistakes that you made. That is to say the faster you are driving the more it is difficult it is to recover from mistakes and more simple accidents can become fatalities, accidents in which people die and I think that is what you have seen on the Yamuna Expressway over the past five years where the number of fatalities has increased dramatically. So much so that today you have a situation where an Expressway which is supposed to be a good example of road engineering in India has turned out to be a death trap. In April IIT Delhi did a security audit on the Yamuna Expressway Authority and gave suggestions. Following this the Expressway Authority requested the UP government to provide rupees 224 crore to implement these suggestions. The information provided by the Yamuna Expressway Authority suggests that 22.42% accidents happened due to the crossing of speed limits and 12% of the accidents occurred due to tyre breakdowns. The Central Road Research Institute had also prepared a report on the Expressway accidents but the suggestions have not yet been implemented.