Safe Routes and Unsafe Walks: How School Geography Shapes Child Safety

Safe Routes and Unsafe Walks: What the Evidence Shows About Getting to School Safely

A contributing voice from child development | Specialist in child development, wellbeing, and community engagement

For millions of children in India, the journey to school is not safe — physically or socially — and the evidence behind that claim is specific enough to act on. India loses more than 15,000 children under 18 to road accidents every year, the highest such toll in the world, and a separate body of research finds that safety concerns specifically depress girls’ enrollment as school distance increases, at roughly double the rate seen for boys. Safe arrival is a precondition for learning, and the evidence on what actually improves it — not just what schools intend to do about it — is more specific and more promising than the general policy discourse suggests.

Key facts

• India loses more than 15,000 children under 18 to road accidents every year — the highest toll in the world, per the World Health Organization’s Global Status Report on Road Safety.
• A cross-sectional study of 5,842 children in Hyderabad found 17% reported a road injury during their school commute in the past 12 months, with boys (25%) more than twice as likely to report an injury as girls (11%).
• The National Crime Records Bureau found that 7.4% of all road-related fatalities in India occur in close proximity to educational institutions — meaning the immediate vicinity of a school gate is itself a measurable risk hotspot, not just the wider commute.
• Research by Chaudhary and Verick (2019) found that each additional kilometre between home and school reduces girls’ enrollment by 16%, compared to 6% for boys — a specifically gendered safety-distance effect, not a uniform one.
• Telangana’s SHE (Safety for Her) initiative — deploying special police units to address street harassment — was associated with 34 percentage points fewer girls dropping out compared to neighbouring states without the intervention (Ashutosh, 2023).
• Bihar’s well-studied bicycle distribution programme (Muralidharan & Prakash, 2017) made commutes measurably safer and produced a significant increase in girls’ secondary-school enrollment — one of the more rigorously evaluated interventions in this area.

The risk is measurable, gendered, and concentrated near the school itself

A school that focuses only on the classroom is managing roughly the second half of a child’s daily risk. The NCRB’s own data puts a meaningful share of road fatalities within sight of the school gate — meaning part of the problem is inside a school’s own zone of influence, not somewhere it can’t reach.

The evidence base splits cleanly into two distinct problems that need different responses. The physical risk — road traffic injury — affects boys more than girls in the raw injury data, concentrated on two-wheelers and unsafe road crossings near schools. The social risk — harassment and the fear of it — depresses girls’ enrollment specifically and disproportionately as distance from home increases, independent of the physical injury data. Treating “safe routes to school” as one undifferentiated problem, as the original framing risks doing, misses that these are two separate mechanisms with two separate, separately evidenced fixes.

Five principles for improving the journey to school

1. Diagnose whether your specific community’s dominant risk is physical (traffic) or social (harassment), and for which children. The data shows these affect boys and girls differently — a generic “the commute is unsafe” assessment will miss which specific intervention actually applies.
2. Build the school-community-police relationship the successful interventions all share. The SHE initiative’s core mechanism was policing and community trust-building together — not a school acting in isolation, and not policing without community buy-in either.
3. Choose sustained infrastructure over a one-off safety campaign. The Bihar bicycle programme’s and Telangana’s SHE initiative’s effects came from ongoing, structural changes — a distributed resource and a standing police presence — not a single road-safety awareness day.
4. Partner directly with local police and transport authorities, since a school cannot fix roads or patrol streets alone. Both of the strongest evidenced interventions here required actors outside the school gate; a headmaster’s most effective move may be initiating that partnership rather than attempting a school-only fix.
5. Start with what’s checkable this week: the routes your own students actually take, and the specific points of risk on them. Given that a meaningful share of fatalities cluster near schools themselves, an audit of the immediate school-gate area — crossing points, drop-off congestion, visibility — is a concrete, low-cost first step available without waiting for a larger road-safety programme.

Frequently asked questions

How big is the road safety risk for Indian schoolchildren, in real terms? Substantial: over 15,000 children under 18 die in road accidents annually, the highest toll globally, and a Hyderabad study found 17% of children reported a commute-related road injury in just the past 12 months.

Does distance to school actually affect girls differently than boys? Yes, measurably: each additional kilometre between home and school reduces girls’ enrollment by roughly 16%, compared to 6% for boys — a specifically gendered effect tied to safety concerns rather than distance alone.

Has anything actually been shown to work, or is this mostly policy aspiration? Two India-specific interventions have real evaluated effects: Telangana’s SHE policing initiative was associated with 34 percentage points fewer girls dropping out compared to neighbouring states, and Bihar’s bicycle programme measurably improved both commute safety and girls’ secondary enrollment.

What’s the fastest thing a school can check this week without new resources? An audit of the immediate area around the school gate — crossing points, drop-off congestion, visibility for pedestrians — since NCRB data shows a meaningful share of road fatalities cluster specifically near educational institutions, not just along the wider commute.

What to do:

1. Identify, specifically, whether the dominant risk for your students is physical (traffic, road crossings) or social (harassment), and for which children — the evidence shows these need different responses.
2. Speak with one colleague or headmaster who has successfully partnered with local police or transport authorities on commute safety, and ask specifically how that partnership started.
3. Read the WRI India “Safe Access to Schools” resources, or research on the Telangana SHE initiative and Bihar’s bicycle programme, and share one specific finding with your headmaster this week.
4. Propose one concrete, checkable step — auditing the immediate school-gate area, or opening a conversation with local police about patrol presence — within your school’s existing capacity.
5. Set a review date four weeks out to check whether the specific step was completed and made any observable difference, and write it down today.

Sources: World Health Organization, Global Status Report on Road Safety, via UNICEF Child and Adolescent Road Safety Technical Guidance (2022); “Road traffic injuries to children during the school commute in Hyderabad, India,” PMC; National Crime Records Bureau data, via Ensuring Safe School Journeys for All Children, Chennai; Chaudhary, M., & Verick, S. (2019); Ashutosh (2023), “Street safety and girls’ secondary schooling in India,” Ideas for India; Muralidharan, K., & Prakash, N. (2017), Bihar bicycle programme research.