The Wire: New Delhi: Monday, December 29, 2025.
A Right to Information (RTI) response received on December 1, 2025 has revealed that 217 good samaritans have been rewarded under the Good Samaritan Scheme (renamed) launched by the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways on October 3, 2021.
Bihar has the maximum number of such awardees, with 95 people. Rajasthan has had 34 beneficiaries of the scheme, while 30 were in Gujarat, 22 in Jharkhand, 12 in Himachal Pradesh, 10 in Nagaland, three each in Andhra Pradesh, Sikkim, Tamil Nadu and Tripura and one each from Jammu and Kashmir and Assam.
Good Samaritans – people who save the life of a victim of a deadly accident involving a motor vehicle by providing immediate assistance and rushing the injured to a hospital or trauma centre within a short time period, referred to as the “golden hour”, to receive medical treatment – are entitled to monetary benefits under this scheme.
The Union government currently provides Rs 25,000 to beneficiaries. Earlier, good samaritans received only Rs 5,000, but the amount was raised in January 2025.
However, the total number of good samaritans awarded and recognised – just 217 since the scheme's inception – under the scheme is small considering the alarmingly high number of road accident fatalities in the country.
The RTI response from the ministry of road transport and highways for people awarded as good samaritans.
This is also reflected in the response of Nitin Jairam Gadkari, Union Minister of Road Transport and Highways, in the Rajya Sabha on December 10, 2025.
The data revealed that the number of road accidents and resulting fatalities grew in India between 2020 and 2024. In 2020, there were 3,72,181 road accidents, which increased to 4,12,432 in 2021, then to 4,61,312 in 2022 and further to 4,80,583 and 4,87,705 in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
Fatalities due to road accidents stood at 1,38,383 in 2020 and rose to 1,53,972 in 2021, then to 1,68,491 in 2022 and to 1,72,890 and 1,77,177 in 2023 and 2024 respectively.
The idea of protecting India’s good samaritans – and therefore making the roads safer – has a more than decade-old history. In 2012, the non-governmental organisation SaveLife Foundation filed a Public Interest Litigation under Article 32 of the Constitution in the Supreme Court. It sought the development of a supportive legal framework to protect those who save lives in the event of accidents. (Article 32 gives Indian citizens the right to move the apex court to enforce fundamental rights.)
On October 29, 2014, the Supreme Court directed the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways and the Ministry of Law and Justice to consult each other and issue directions to protect good samaritans.
The Good Samaritan Guidelines were issued in a highway ministry notification on May 12, 2015. Hospitals, police and other authorities were required to follow them to protect these life-savers from harassment and to encourage behaviour that could save lives.
A Union Ministry of Road Transport and Highways note from April 2025 on details of the scheme. It has since been renamed Rah-Veer Yojana (Road Braveheart Scheme).
In March 2016, the Supreme Court, ruling on the SaveLife Foundation’s PIL, issued directions to implement and enforce the guidelines so that accident victims could receive immediate help and those who assisted them were not subjected to legal or other trouble. The apex court had then stated: “Good Samaritans have the fear of legal consequences, involvement in litigation and repeated visits to police station.”
Legislative changes to the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988 (MV Act) followed soon after. The MV (Amendment) Act, 2019 came into effect on August 9, 2019. Provisions were added to ensure protection of good samaritans from harassment by police authorities and to shield them from criminal or civil action. The amendment also enabled the Union government to frame rules on procedures for questioning or examining good samaritans, as well as on the disclosure of their personal information and related matters.
The rights of good samaritans were further strengthened when the road transport ministry published the new rules on September 29, 2020. These protected their right to privacy and prevented police personnel from compelling them to disclose their name, identity, address or any other personal details, unless they voluntarily chose to do so.
The rules also directed private and public hospitals to publish a charter in Hindi, English and a third language on their websites and in conspicuous areas of hospital premises, stating the rights of good samaritans under the MV Act, 2019.
However, these legislative and executive changes, which followed a successful exercise of judicial activism, have not unfolded on the ground as one might have hoped. A report published in the Times of India in May this year highlighted how the Good Samaritan policy was not receiving a strong response from people in Jharkhand. The Deputy Inspector General of the road safety cell, Dhananjaya Singh, told the daily that lack of awareness and compassion were the main reasons for the lukewarm response.
On November 3, a dump truck driver allegedly under the influence of alcohol mowed down 17 vehicles in Jaipur, Rajasthan, injuring 13 people and killing 14. Prime Minister Narendra Modi announced compensation of Rs 2 lakh for the deceased and Rs 50,000 for those injured. A Times of India report from November 7 noted that several locals came forward to help police and ambulance workers transport the injured to hospitals. However, none of the volunteers received incentives or acknowledgement from the state government.
A World Health Organisation report on road traffic injury prevention published in 2004 pointed out that much of the low-income population does not have access to even basic emergency medical services and that evacuation and transport to hospital is more often carried out by bystanders, relatives, commercial vehicles or the police. For this reason, protecting and rewarding good samaritans is even more crucial in developing countries such as India, where medical infrastructure remains inadequate for road networks prone to high accident rates.
However, judicial, legislative and executive actions undertaken in the public interest have not had as radical an on-ground impact in a country with some of the world’s most unsafe roads.
Sourodpito Sanyal is a freelance journalist.
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