Six-Year RTI Study Finds 875 Dead, 3,475 Accidents on Chenab Valley's Roads

DODA: The roads of Chenab Valley recorded 3,475 accidents, killed 875 people and injured 4,687 more between 2019 and 2024. The toll works out to roughly one crash every 15 hours and one road death every two and a half days, year after year, for six consecutive years.

That is the headline finding of a new report ‘Road Safety in Chenab Valley (2019-2024)’ from the Chenab Times Foundation, a charitable trust based in Thathri, which says it has compiled the first consolidated, district-by-district statistical picture of road safety across the valley's three constituent districts - Doda, Kishtwar and Ramban - using official police data rather than media tallies or state-level summaries.

The report is built entirely on responses to three separate applications filed under the Right to Information (RTI) Act, 2005 - all under a single registration number, Zonal/R/2025/60006. Each district police headquarters responded independently and on its own timeline through 2025:

• Doda: The Road Wing section of District Police Doda replied on July 11, 2025 (Ref. DHQ/RTI/2025/3807).

• Kishtwar: District Police Headquarters Kishtwar, compiling figures from every Station House Officer in the district, replied on August 28, 2025 (Ref. Dy.SP/Hqrs/RTI/25/5977-75).

• Ramban: District Police Headquarters Ramban replied on September 17, 2025 (Ref. DHQ/RTI/2025/17044-46) and was the only one of the three to break its numbers down further by severity: fatal, grievous injury, minor injury and non-injury cases.

The Foundation says calculations such as fatality rates and percentage shares were derived independently from the raw figures supplied. It also flags a scope limitation. The numbers cover only cases formally registered with district police, so unreported accidents, cases transferred to other jurisdictions, and incidents involving state-owned vehicles may not be fully captured.

Chenab Valley is carved by the Chenab River and its tributaries and sits within the Union Territory of Jammu and Kashmir. Its road network is defined by steep gradients, hairpin bends, seasonal landslides and a shortage of crash barriers. The report treats the terrain as the backdrop against which all three districts' figures need to be read.

Ramban: The most crashes

Ramban district, through which the Jammu–Srinagar National Highway (NH-44) runs, recorded 1,576 accidents - 45.4% of the valley's six-year total - and 341 deaths, both the highest of the three districts. Yet at 21.6 deaths per 100 accidents, it posted the lowest fatality rate in the valley, below Doda's and well below Kishtwar's.

The report links Ramban's sheer accident volume to heavy traffic density and the narrow, winding character of NH-44 as it cuts through the district, rather than to any single especially lethal stretch. Annual accident counts stayed fairly steady through the period, from 201 in the pandemic year of 2020 to 286 in 2021, and injuries stayed above 290 every year except 2020.

Kishtwar: Fewest Crashes, Highest death rate

Kishtwar, the remotest and most sparsely populated of the three districts, recorded by far the fewest accidents - 576 over six years, just 16.6% of the valley’s total. But it recorded the highest fatality rate by a wide margin: 39.4 deaths per 100 accidents, against a valley average of 25.2.

In 2019 alone, 58 of the district's 77 recorded accidents proved fatal, a 75.3% rate. The report calls this Kishtwar's "lethality paradox” and links it to the district's high-altitude terrain, narrow roads and greater distance from trauma care.

Kishtwar's accident count has also climbed steadily, from 67 in 2020 to 124 in 2024, an 85% rise the report singles out as a trend needing urgent attention.

Doda’s Unexplained 2023 Spike

Doda recorded 1,323 accidents (38.1% of the Chenab valley total) and 307 deaths, giving it a fatality rate of 23.2 per 100 accidents. This is below the Chenab Valley average, and the second lowest of the three districts.

Its clearest anomaly came in 2023, when deaths jumped to 76 even though the accident count that year (212) was unremarkable by the district's own recent history - the highest single-district, single-year death toll in the whole dataset apart from Ramban's 2019 peak.

The report reads this as evidence of a cluster of unusually severe crashes and recommends targeted investigation into what happened that year. By 2024, Doda's fatalities had fallen to 27, the lowest of the study period, which the report cautiously reads as a sign of "localised improvement."

2019 was the starting baseline and, in relative terms, the deadliest year of the period - 206 deaths from 601 accidents, driven largely by Kishtwar's extraordinary fatality ratio that year. 2020's sharp dip across every district tracks COVID-19 lockdowns cutting traffic volumes valley-wide.

But the rebound was fast. By 2021, accident counts were already back near pre-pandemic levels, and they stayed roughly flat - between 588 and 621 accidents a year - right through 2024. The report reads that quick, sustained rebound, without any lasting dip in the years that followed, as a sign that the lockdown period produced no structural road-safety improvements.

Deaths, meanwhile, trended gradually downward across the six years even as accidents held steady, and injuries crept up, from 778 in 2019 to 889 in 2024, which the report attributes to some combination of worsening severity per crash and more complete injury reporting over time.

What's driving the toll

The report points to a cluster of overlapping causes rather than a single explanation:

• Terrain and infrastructure. Steep gradients, hairpin bends, seasonal landslides and a shortage of crash barriers across the valley's mountain roads compound the ordinary hazards of driving.

• NH-44 traffic through Ramban. The district's outsized accident count tracks its position on the Jammu–Srinagar highway, where heavy goods vehicles and a narrow, winding carriageway create persistent hotspots.

• Distance from trauma care in Kishtwar. The report links the district's disproportionate fatality rate to its remoteness and the extra time it takes to get badly injured crash victims to advanced medical care.

• Vehicle overloading, which it cites as a contributing factor across all three districts, alongside generally inadequate road infrastructure and limited emergency-response capacity.

What the report recommends

The Foundation lays out six proposals for district and state authorities:

1.    Identify and fix black spots: formally map accident hotspots, particularly along NH-44 in Ramban and the approaches to Kishtwar, and install crash barriers, rumble strips, signage and wider carriageways at dangerous bends.

2.    Build trauma-care capacity in Kishtwar: a dedicated trauma centre, or at minimum a well-equipped first-response unit on the district's main routes, on the reasoning that many of its deaths are from otherwise survivable injuries.

3.    Regulate heavy vehicles on NH-44: enforce load limits, require fitness certificates for goods vehicles, and introduce digital speed enforcement on the highway's most dangerous stretches through Ramban.

4.    Expand road-safety education: regular awareness campaigns at the gram panchayat level across all three districts, with particular emphasis on seatbelt and helmet compliance and the risks of night driving.

5.    Institutionalise annual reporting: each district administration should publish its own disaggregated annual road-safety report, form a District Road Safety Committee, and set measurable targets for cutting accidents and deaths.

6.    Treat Kishtwar's rising trend as a standing priority: with accidents up 85% since 2020, the report calls for a dedicated task force to audit the district's road network, driver licensing and enforcement capacity.

The wider picture

The Chenab Valley's outsized road toll has been documented before, from different angles and different data sets. A Jammu and Kashmir government-appointed committee, examining a slightly different window (January 2019 to October 2024), found that the valley's three districts accounted for roughly a fifth of all road deaths across the Union Territory despite their relatively small population.

It noted 852 fatalities in the region against a Jammu and Kashmir-wide total of 4,899 killed and 40,065 injured over the same stretch, according to reports (here and here). That committee, too, pointed to poorly constructed roads as the primary cause, and identified ravine plunges as the dominant type of fatal accident on the valley's narrow highways.

The toll includes some of the deadliest single crashes in the Union Territory's recent history. It included a bus that plunged into a gorge in Kishtwar in 2019 killed 35 people and a bus that fell around 300 feet into a ravine in Doda's Assar area on 15 November 2023 killed 39. Both incidents fall within the six-year window the new Foundation report covers.

There has also been a policy response at the state level. Jammu and Kashmir government notified a Road Safety Policy in March 2025, setting a target of cutting road accidents and fatalities by 50% by 2030 - a goal the Foundation's district-level findings, and its call for annual district-by-district reporting, are effectively positioned to help track.

The toll has continued past the report's 2024 cut-off. State figures reported by IBTimes India in April 2026 showed the three Chenab districts recording a combined 588 accidents, 118 deaths and 922 injuries in 2025 alone. Of these, 216 accidents, 38 deaths and 344 injuries happened in Doda; 230 accidents, 45 deaths and 394 injuries in Ramban; and 142 accidents, 35 deaths and 184 injuries in Kishtwar.

The Foundation's report blames the same terrain for the region's accident toll, which continues to disrupt the roads outright. In July 2026, flash floods and landslides blocked the Doda–Kishtwar stretch of National Highway 244 near Thathri, burying sections of the road under debris, according to a report.

The report frames road safety in Chenab Valley as a public-health emergency rather than a routine administrative matter, and calls on the district administrations of Doda, Kishtwar and Ramban, the traffic police, the National Highways Authority of India, and the Jammu and Kashmir government to act on its findings.

As the report puts it in its closing lines: "The data exists. The will to act must follow."

A note on the data

The CT Foundation report is not perfectly internally consistent on one measure. Its executive summary and district-summary figures put Ramban's six-year injury total at 2,130 (and the valley-wide injury total, accordingly, at 4,687), while its detailed year-by-year appendix table for Ramban sums to 2,185, which would put the valley-wide injury total at 4,742 instead. The discrepancy does not affect the accident or fatality figures, which reconcile exactly across every table in the report. This article uses the headline figures (2,130 / 4,687) as they appear in the report's executive summary and key findings.