Every hour, roughly twenty Indians leave home and never come back. They die on national highways, on village crossroads, at unmarked turns, nearly 180,000 lives a year, the highest road toll of any country on earth. Most of them are young. Many are the sole earners for their families. And behind almost every one of those deaths is a truth that Piyush Tewari has spent eighteen years trying to make the country understand: these are not accidents. They are failures we already know how to prevent.
Piyush Tewari is the founder and CEO of SaveLIFE Foundation (SLF), which is a road-safety organization. But he did not start out to save lives. He was succeeding in the corporate sector and it took a death in his own family to change everything.
In an exclusive interview, Piyush Tewari details his transition from a private equity executive to a pioneering advocate for road safety and trauma care. Prompted by a personal tragedy, he established the SaveLIFE Foundation, which has evolved from a policy advocacy group into a nationwide force operating across sixteen states.
SaveLIFE comprises of a team of problem-solvers drawn from data science, engineering, public policy and government, working across states, actively implementing data-driven, culturally empathetic solutions to save thousands of lives and reform India’s transport safety ecosystem, through the groundbreaking Zero Fatality Corridor and District programs as well.
The Death That Changed Everything
Before SaveLIFE, Tewari built a career in investment and corporate strategy. He began at the India Brand Equity Foundation, an initiative of the Prime Minister of India, set up to promote the country as a competitive global investment destination, which gave him early exposure to macroeconomics and international relations. He went on to a US-based private equity fund, managing investments across the India–US corridor and eventually running its India operations as Executive Director.
Then, in a single afternoon, the arc of his life bent. His young cousin was hit in a road crash and left lying on the road for a long time with no one to help. He did not die because his injuries were unsurvivable. He died because no help reached him in time, the ordinary, preventable gap between a crash and a hospital that kills thousands of Indians every year.
For Tewari, it was not only grief. It was a problem- a solvable one that had gone unsolved. And that, he says, is what he cannot walk away from.
“To come from such a background and to leave a high-paying job in the corporate sector, to do something in the non-profit space without a salary initially, was very hard… What I realised was that in my leadership style, I like solving complex problems. And this was a complex problem I had come across that needed a resolution.”
Four Chapters One Mission
SaveLIFE has not stood still. Over its eighteen years, Tewari has effectively iterated the organisation four times, each version reaching deeper into the system that produces road deaths.
The first chapter was about the law. SLF’s advocacy helped secure India’s Good Samaritan protections which is the rules that shield ordinary citizens from police and legal harassment when they stop to help a crash victim which was later given force by the Supreme Court in 2016. It also contributed to the landmark Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act, 2019, which tightened standards on vehicle safety, child safety, crash investigation and infrastructure accountability.
The second and third chapters moved from the courtroom to the tarmac. SLF adopted some of the country’s most lethal stretches including the Mumbai – Pune Expressway among them and began treating each fatal crash as evidence rather than fate. The result was the Zero Fatality Corridor: a model that studies exactly why people die on a road and then fixes those specific causes.
The fourth, and current, chapter is the most ambitious. Working in partnership with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, SLF is stretching that corridor model across entire districts with its Zero Fatality District programme, with the goal of embedding road safety into how administrations and police already work, rather than running a parallel effort alongside them.
Reading Roads Like Crime Scenes
What makes SaveLIFE’s approach different is that it refuses to guess. For every serious crash, the team asks five hard questions: where exactly it happened, when, which vehicles were involved, what human behaviour contributed, and how the impact actually unfolded.
To answer them, SLF pulls together police reports, electronic crash records (eDAR) and even ambulance movement data, and builds detailed maps that reveal a road’s most dangerous points down to the metre. A stretch that locals simply call “unlucky” turns out to have a badly designed junction, a blind curve, or a spot where help can never arrive fast enough.
Then comes the fix and it is always specific. On one site the answer might be re-engineering a dangerous intersection; on another, sharper enforcement against speeding; on a third, cutting the time it takes for an ambulance to reach the injured. SLF brings the local transport office, the highways authority, the public works department and the police to the same table, and every black spot gets its own tailored solution. No single template is pasted onto every road.
Indians Were Never The Problem
One of the most stubborn myths about India’s roads is that people simply don’t care enough to stop and help. Tewari argues the opposite, that the willingness was always there, and what was missing was protection.
“Indians are not afraid of helping… The problem in the case of road crashes was that the environment was such that people were afraid they’d be subjected to police questioning… Indians just needed a protective environment so that they could be insulated from any kind of legal hassle when they helped an injured person.”
The numbers back him up. In 2013, national surveys found that only one in four bystanders said they would help an injured stranger on the road. Today, after the Good Samaritan protections and years of public awareness, three in four say they would step in or call for help. That single shift from one in four to three in four, is the difference between countless people bleeding out alone and getting a hand within minutes.
The Proof On The Ground
The evidence is now hard to ignore. On roads where SaveLIFE has worked, fatalities have fallen sharply: by around 55% on the Mumbai–Pune Expressway, 68% on the old NH48, and 45% on the Yamuna Expressway. In the first quarter of 2026, Uttar Pradesh, where the district programme runs statewide, recorded an 11.5% drop in road deaths. SLF estimates its interventions were associated with 1,778 lives saved last year alone.
That track record has drawn global attention. SaveLIFE now works alongside institutions like the WHO and the World Bank, has been supported by the UN Road Safety Fund, and has presented its methodology at the United Nations- a rare journey for a model born on an Indian expressway.
Your Guide To Leaping
Tewari is not done. The next phase aims to take the Zero Fatality model to all of India’s roughly 780 districts, to help build a National Road Safety Code, and to pilot the approach beyond India’s borders in Southeast Asia. To get there, SaveLIFE is expanding its team and hiring public-minded data scientists, engineers, economists and government-relations specialists.
His pitch to anyone in the corporate world tempted to switch tracks is disarmingly simple: few jobs let you defend so many fundamental rights at once. Safe roads, he points out, are what let people reach school, a clinic, or a day’s work at all.
“By ensuring our roads are safer, you are actually guaranteeing people the right to life, right to livelihood, right to health, right to education, which no other work will give you the opportunity to do in such a wide variety of ways… If solving a complex problem gives you a thrill, something deeply intertwined with the way infrastructure works but not yet resolved, then this is the right sector.”
The Logical Indian’s Perspective
Piyush Tewari’s work reveals that road crash fatalities are not unavoidable accidents, but systemic failures that demand rigorous, scientific resolution. For decades, the structural loss of lives on public roads was treated with passive compliance, resulting in staggering human tragedies and severe economic drains on the country. By successfully combining top-down legislative protection with bottom-up, data-backed engineering interventions, the SaveLIFE Foundation proves that zero-fatality infrastructure is entirely achievable when public safety is treated as an absolute, non-negotiable right.
How can municipal planning frameworks and corporate logistics sectors step beyond basic compliance to co-invest in the data-driven systems required to guarantee every citizen a safe journey home?
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