India's 6,358 identified black corridors have claimed 37,164 lives since 2023, Parliament was told this week. A look at how these stretches are mapped, where they cluster, and how far the rectification effort has actually reached.
On 23 July 2026, the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways told the Rajya Sabha, in response to a question by MP Sagarika Ghose, that 6,358 accident-prone "black corridors" have been identified on National Highways, together spanning 6,409.7 km, and that these corridors alone claimed 37,164 lives between 2023 and 2025. The stretches were mapped using artificial intelligence-based tools working off the e-DAR platform, which allows near real-time identification of clusters of fatal and grievous crashes rather than relying only on periodic manual surveys.
This is a distinct, more recent count from the older "black spot" tally of 13,795 discussed further below, which measures individual 500-metre danger points rather than continuous high-risk stretches; the two datasets are not directly comparable and are presented separately in this piece.
Indian road safety data works at three levels, and the terms are often used loosely in news reports.
A black spot is the base unit: an official definition is a roughly 500-metre stretch of national highway that has recorded either five or more accidents involving fatalities or grievous injury, or ten or more fatalities, over three consecutive calendar years. A black corridor sits one level up. It is an extended, continuous stretch of highway with an unusually high rate of severe accidents, made up of several individual black spots strung together into one large high-risk zone. The Ministry also tracks the opposite: white corridors, stretches with no reported accidents, where the effort is to keep them that way through preventive measures.
Road Transport and Highways Minister Nitin Gadkari has repeated a version of these figures in Parliament through 2025 and into 2026. India records roughly 4.8 to 5 lakh road accidents a year, resulting in an estimated 1.5 to 1.8 lakh deaths, the highest fatality count of any country in the world. Two out of three of those killed are between 18 and 45 years of age. On National Highways specifically, which carry a disproportionate share of long-distance, high-speed traffic, fatalities have stayed above 52,000 a year through 2023 and 2024, with over 26,700 recorded in just the first six months of 2025.
Rectification has moved more slowly than identification. As of a Rajya Sabha reply in March 2025, only 5,036 of the 13,795 identified black spots had received long-term engineering fixes, such as junction redesigns, underpasses or geometric correction, though 11,515 had at least received short-term measures like signage, crash barriers and road markings. A separate reply in July 2025 put the long-term count at 3,144 against 8,542 short-term fixes, a reminder that these are moving figures updated periodically rather than a single fixed dataset. In December 2025, the Minister told the Lok Sabha that around 7,000 black spots had been rectified in all, alongside a new Rs 40,000 crore scheme to address the backlog.
A reply tabled in the Lok Sabha on 22 July 2026, responding to an unstarred question by Rajya Sabha MP Dr Sasmit Patra, gives a useful worked example of how the black corridor classification plays out on the ground. The Ministry identified 74 accident-prone black corridors on National Highways across the two Union Territories: 73 in ten districts of Jammu and Kashmir, and one in Kargil district of Ladakh. Jammu district alone accounted for 30 of these corridors, followed by Samba (14) and Kathua (13).
In a companion reply, the Ministry stated that 1,350 people were killed and 10,690 injured in 10,251 road accidents across Jammu and Kashmir between 2020 and 2024, a toll that stayed in a narrow band of roughly 258 to 294 deaths a year through the period, showing little underlying improvement despite continued rectification work.
The 23 July 2026 reply also broke down the 6,358 black corridors by state. Tamil Nadu tops the list by a wide margin, followed by Uttar Pradesh and Karnataka. A separate Rajya Sabha reply gave district-wise figures, with Villupuram in Tamil Nadu recording the single highest count of any district in the country.
Six of the top districts nationally are split across Tamil Nadu (3), Maharashtra, West Bengal and Kerala, broadly tracking the states with the highest overall corridor counts, though Purba Medinipur in West Bengal stands out given West Bengal's more modest state-level rank.
Black spots are not evenly spread. A Ministry dataset placed before Parliament in March 2025 (13,795 spots nationally) shows the heaviest concentrations in West Bengal, Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, Telangana and Tamil Nadu. States with hill and border terrain, and states carrying the heaviest long-distance freight traffic, tend to feature high on this list.
| State / UT | Black Spots | Short-Term Fixed | Long-Term Fixed |
|---|---|---|---|
| West Bengal | 1,253 | 1,108 | 543 |
| Andhra Pradesh | 1,202 | 768 | 338 |
| Karnataka | 1,217 | 1,048 | 515 |
| Telangana | 1,121 | 966 | 288 |
| Tamil Nadu (incl. Puducherry) | 1,080 | 986 | 359 |
| Uttar Pradesh | 981 | 742 | 349 |
| Rajasthan | 954 | 867 | 238 |
| Punjab | 911 | 911 | 439 |
| Kerala | 692 | 420 | 66 |
| Madhya Pradesh | 674 | 555 | 220 |
For the complete state and Union Territory-wise list, please visit the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways website.
Guidelines issued in August 2019 allow field engineers to act on a black spot immediately after a site inspection, without waiting for a full project approval cycle. The Ministry runs the Electronic Detailed Accident Report (e-DAR) system as a centralised platform for logging and analysing accident data across states, which now feeds the periodic figures placed before Parliament.
Road safety audits have now been made mandatory for National Highways at every stage: design, construction, pre-opening, operation and maintenance. Road Safety Officers have been designated at the regional offices of road-owning agencies to oversee this work. The Ministry has also acknowledged, in a separate reply, that permanent engineering fixes at black corridors are frequently delayed by land acquisition, forest clearance and utility-shifting requirements, which explains much of the gap between short-term and long-term rectification numbers seen throughout this piece.
That delay is not confined to black corridor fixes. Of 1,191 National Highway projects currently under construction, 629 have crossed their original completion schedule, and 103 contractors and concessionaires were penalised or blacklisted for poor-quality work between 2023-24 and 2025-26, according to the Minister's separate replies in the same session.
In March 2025, the Parliamentary Standing Committee on Transport, Tourism and Culture, chaired by Rajya Sabha MP Sanjay Kumar Jha, described the continued existence of unrectified black spots as a governance failure rather than a technical one. The Committee recommended a three-tier priority system: Category A (highest risk) spots to receive at least a temporary fix within 30 days of identification, with Category B and C spots given 90 and 180-day deadlines respectively, along with penalties for implementing agencies that miss them.