Bharat NCAP, India's own car crash testing programme, launched

India now has its own car crash testing programme called Bharat NCAP, which will come into effect from October 1. Launching the new programme, Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, Nitin Gadkari said Bharat NCAP is aimed at improving road safety standards of motor vehicles weighing up to 3.5 tonnes. The new car crash assessment programme will provide car customers with a tool to gauge how safe their next car, which is available on the market, would be when it crashes. Car makers can also volunteer to offer their cars assessed for crashes in line with Automotive Industry Standard (AIS) 197 under Bharat NCAP.

“This is a landmark step towards empowering our consumers for being able to make a better choice for buying safer cars,” Gadkari posted on X (previously Twitter). The Union Minister also posted a video that explains how Bharat NCAP will make sure cars make as less impact as possible on the driver and passengers when they engage in a crash on the road. As part of the Bharat NCAP, vehicles will be awarded ratings, represented by up to five stars, for Adult Occupants (AOP) and Child Occupants (COP) after an analysis of their performance in crash assessments. The star ratings will help customers make healthy buying decisions by giving customers a parameter to check how safe a car is as compared to others.

Driving Towards Safety: BHARAT NCAP Revolutionizes Vehicle Standards in India.#BharatNCAP pic.twitter.com/Y2zA9E3Hni

— Nitin Gadkari (@nitin_gadkari) August 22, 2023

“This is the time when we have the highest priority for how we can save lives of the people, and road safety is the most important thing for that. Road engineering is a big problem somewhere; our total process of making detailed project reports is a completely wrong methodology,” Gadkari said at the launch. “We are trying out level best to educate our engineers about the types of mistakes we are repeating in road engineering.”

Bharat NCAP is a derivative of the Global NCAP, which is a vehicle crash assessment programme that analyses different safety aspects when a vehicle is driven at 64kmph into a deformable barrier at 40 percent overlap. This is a simulation of a collision between two moving cars at about 50 kmph of the same weight. Global NCAP is a project of the Towards Zero Foundation, a UK-based charity.