Extraordinary Indians: How Piyush Tiwari Turned Personal Loss Into a Road-Safety Movement That Saved Lives

It was nearly two decades ago, and yet Piyush Tewari remembers the day with unsettling clarity—his young cousin was fatally injured in a car accident. Witnesses later told Tewari that his relative was not alone on that tragic day. Plenty of people had stopped—some offered water, others watched. But no one called the police, or an ambulance. No one rushed him to a hospital. “He died on the side of the road,” Tewari says grimly. “A life was lost to hesitation.”

That knowledge refused to let him move on. He felt more than outrage.

An uncomfortable question lingered: Why had no one acted?

As Tewari began to look closer, the answer surprised him. Indians, he found, are not indifferent to the suffering of others. “When there’s a train accident, villages rush in to help,” he says. “When there’s a blast, people run toward it.” Road crashes were different because helping came at a cost. “People were afraid—of being detained, harassed, dragged into court cases. The system made it dangerous to be helpful.” In 2008, that understanding led him to found the SaveLIFE Foundation to protect those who try to help and, over time, to overhaul the very systems that made help so costly.

At the time, he had no clear roadmap. “I knew what the problem was,” he says, “but I had zero answers on how to solve it.” What he did know was that the scale of loss—close to two lakh lives every year—could not be addressed through individual goodwill. “This needed an institutional response,” he says.

SaveLIFE’s early years were marked by experimentation and persistence. One of its first initiatives was training police personnel in basic trauma life support. The breakthrough came in June 2009, when Tewari received a fax from the Delhi Police. Officers trained by SaveLIFE had saved a young motorcyclist by performing CPR while rushing him to the hospital. “That was my first personal win,” Tewari recalls. “Our belief that resistance could be overcome and systems could change were validated.”

“Safe roads are still seen as infrastructure, not as a basic human right,” says Tewari

The work that would define his national impact came later. In 2012, SaveLIFE approached the Supreme Court, arguing that legal procedures must never obstruct life-saving action. Four years later, the Court agreed, giving India the Good Samaritan Law. For the first time, bystanders who helped victims were protected from harassment and detention. It was a landmark moment—not just legally, but culturally. Today, the framework goes further, with provisions that actively encourage and recognise Good Samaritans.

For Tewari, however, legal interventions were only the first step. He realised that protecting those who help was only one piece of a much larger puzzle. India’s primary road safety law—the Motor Vehicles Act of 1988—was outdated and dangerously lenient. Beginning in 2013, SaveLIFE worked closely with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, submitting research-backed recommendations that later shaped the 2019 Motor Vehicles (Amendment) Act.

Many of the law’s most consequential provisions—steeper penalties for traffic violations, accountability for road contractors, tighter licensing norms, and child safety requirements—reflected years of SaveLIFE’s advocacy. “For decades, road crashes were treated as unfortunate tragedies,” Tewari says. “We worked to reframe them as a public health and governance failure.” The amended law marked a decisive shift: from accepting road deaths as inevitable, to recognising them as preventable.

Road safety, he insists, is not about blaming drivers alone. It is about designing systems that anticipate human behaviour. Under SaveLIFE’s Zero Fatality Programme, the organisation works with governments to redesign dangerous highways and districts using data, enforcement, and emergency-care reforms. “We’re currently working on 100 highways and 100 districts,” he says. “These alone account for a third of all road fatalities in the country.”

Technology has played a crucial role in that effort. Long before artificial intelligence entered popular vocabulary, SaveLIFE was using AI-enabled drones to identify stalled trucks and prevent fatal rear-end collisions. AI-trained cameras now detect risky behaviour, integrate with state enforcement systems, and have helped scale electronic policing across highways.

"Everybody wants to change. But the structural reforms that are required at ground level are not moving. So there's a lot more salience required by leaders to get things done," Tewari says.

Despite progress, however, frustrations remain. “Safe roads are still seen as infrastructure, not as a basic human right,” he says. Roads, he points out, connect people to education, health, and livelihood. “They are the arteries through which all other rights flow.”

Implementation, he admits, is hardest where governance is fragmented. Road safety cuts across departments—transport, police, health, local authorities. Where leaders break silos, results follow. Where they don’t, momentum falters. His goals also extends beyond India. “Solutions have largely come from the West,” he says. “We’re building one that emerges from the Global South—evidence-based, culturally empathetic, and scalable.”

The numbers still haunt him: around 1,70,000 deaths a year in India alone. But Tewari remains resolutely optimistic. He speaks warmly of a new generation of tech-savvy, solutions-oriented public servants and partners, who are impatient with the old excuses. “For every skeptic,” he says, “I meet three people who want to fix the problem. We’re also finding a rare convergence of working solutions, committed teams, and governments finally willing to act. This alignment has come for the first time in a long time. We have to seize it.”

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