Beyond the Gantry: Why India’s Road Safety Push Needs Enforcement That Moves

1. Drivers know exactly where the cameras are. Every fixed camera is mapped within weeks — by word of mouth and by navigation apps that flag enforcement points in real time. Road-safety researchers call the result the “kangaroo effect”: a landmark Belgian study found speeds dropped sharply at the camera itself, yet barely changed before or after it, as drivers braked for the lens and accelerated away. Compliance becomes a 200-metre performance staged for the camera, while the same violations continue unchecked on every unwatched stretch.

2. Plates are being masked — sometimes by hand. Enforcement that depends on reading a number plate invites tampering with the number plate. Two-wheeler riders have been observed simply cupping a hand over the rear plate as they pass a known gantry — a trick that works precisely because the camera’s position and angle never change.

3. Most fatal roads will never carry a gantry. In 2024, 41.9% of India’s fatal accidents occurred on “other roads” — not national or state highways but district roads, urban arterials and rural links where gantry structures, mains power and fibre backhaul are impractical or simply unjustifiable. Narrow inner-city lanes, market streets and village approach roads see intense two-wheeler traffic and some of the worst rider behaviour, yet they sit permanently outside the reach of pole- and gantry-mounted systems.

4. Manual mobile enforcement ties up scarce personnel. The traditional answer — an officer with a speed gun at a check-post — consumes exactly the resource police forces have least of. Modern automatic mobile units invert this: detection, classification, evidence capture and e-challan generation run with zero input from personnel, so the officer (or the vehicle itself, parked and unmanned) becomes a force multiplier rather than a bottleneck, freeing trained staff for accident response, congestion management and investigation.