Roads to Hell: Here are India's most dangerous national highways

The deaths of 17 people in an accident on Sunday on the Pune-Mumbai Expressway, a part of Thane-Chennai National Highway 4, once again brings to the fore the dangers of road travel in India.

According to the Global Status Report on Road Safety released by the World Health Organisation in 2015, more than two lakh deaths occur on India’s roads.

The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways revealed in a report that in 2013, over 39,829 people were killed in accidents on national highways alone. That number rose to 42,049 in 2014.

But all that’s going to change soon, if the ministry has its way. The ministry has allocated Rs. 11,000 crore to fix 726 ‘black spots’ on national highways in the coming five years.  According to government guidelines, a black spot is classified as a location on a national highway that witnesses more than 10 accidents a year. The states with the highest number of black spots are Tamil Nadu (100), Uttar Pradesh (99) and Karnataka (86), according to Factly .

Here we take a look at the top four deadliest national highways in India:

Delhi-Kolkata Highway

Official name: National Highway 2 Connects: Delhi, Haryana, Uttar Pradesh, Bihar, Jharkhand, and West Bengal Length: Over 1,465 km Black spots: 59

Delhi-Mumbai highway

Official name: National Highway 8 Connects: Delhi, Gurgaon, Jaipur, Ajmer, Udaipur, Ahmedabad, Vadodara, Surat and Mumbai Length: 1,428 km Black spots: 45

Nongstoin-Sabroom Highway

Official name: National Highway 44 Connects: Nongstoin, Shillong, Passi, Badarpur, Agartala and Sabroom Length: 723 km Black spots: 38

Thane- Chennai Highway

Official name: National Highway 4 Connects: Mumbai, Pune, Bangalore and Chennai Length: 1,235 km Black spots: 27