The most fair common comparison I’ve seen is per-capital traffic deaths against China. India still comes out bad. This brings up one of my most vivid/terrifying travel memories, crossing a busy intersection in Chennai. Traffic lights were not observed, so the way to cross was like something out of fairy tale advice: step out, walk slowly, don’t run, don’t stop and don’t turn back. The bike/cars/buses/trucks will all drive around you. There is not consensus on whether or not to make eye contact with the drivers, however. I was not familiar with this at the time, and followed closely behind some other folks crossing the street. For the record, most of the world is not like this, even the developing world. The only other places I’ve heard of having to do this are Manila and HCMC. To get an idea of what it’s like, do a video search for “India intersection” - there is a “viral” video from 10-ish years ago that captures the chaos pretty well.
In India I was in constant fear for my life, unless traffic was slowed to a crawl. In HCMC I could at least see that there was some sort of system. I'd rather be on the back of a mototaxi in Vietnam than in a car in most of China too, every taxi ride was terrifying.
I don't think most traffic deaths happen at busy intersections in India during the day. The speeds are too low for serious accidents.
Indian highways (National and State) disproportionately account for a majority of the deaths and accidents on Indian roads. A 2019 report from the Road Ministry states that [1] "Highways (both National and State) which accounted for about 5% of total road network witnessed a disproportionately large share of accidents of 55 % and accident related fatalities of 63% during the year 2019 and naturally become the focus of our attention. More accidents on these have been attributed to higher vehicles speeds and increasingly higher volume of traffic on these roads."
Indian highways are notoriously under-policed, way worse than urban roads. You can literally go twice the speed limits and never get ticketed. Coupled with bad designs, illegal pedestrian crossings and a mix of vehicular traffic with widely different speeds leads to a dangerous mix of conditions.
Don’t forget rural roads frequently and immediately transition into roadworks projects with little or no signage! Just a piece of wood that says “diversion”
I feel like at least this way the drivers are paying attention to everything on the road. I noticed in Indonesia, the way you turn into a road is not to wait for a big gap, but to judge if the car coming down that road towards you has enough room to semi-comfortably slow down before it would hit you (if their tyres have to screech to stop they'll honk at you), if that's the case, it means you're free to enter... it's terribly inefficient time and energy-wise because cars have to brake and accelerate all the time, and all the cutting in means traffic becomes a crawl anyway.
It is also terribly dangerous as the the accident statistics show. People are not good at paying attention continuously, so we need to make rules and infrastructure that minimize the bad effects of inattention.
