India gets its own NCAP rating for vehicle safety standard

The government will launch the Bharat New Car Assessment Programme (B-NCAP) in October to assess the safety of new vehicles.

The programme will assign star ratings based on a vehicle's performance in crash tests similar to global NCAP and European NCAP, ultimately improving road safety in the country.

Minister for Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) Nitin Gadkari, while announcing the launch of B-NCAP on Tuesday, emphasized the importance of safer vehicles in India, where there are 5 lakh accidents and 1.5 lakh deaths annually.

He also said B-NCAP would help the industry tap the export market with both cost and quality propositions.

Under Bharat NCAP, automobiles in India will receive star ratings based on their crash test performance. 

This will provide a consumer-centric platform for customers to choose safer cars based on their ratings while promoting healthy competition among OEMs in India to manufacture safer vehicles.

Star Rating of Indian cars based on crash tests is crucial not only to ensure structural and passenger safety in cars, but to also increase the export-worthiness of Indian automobiles.

It would also increase localisation of safety components that would help in overall adoption and production of safer vehicles.

Though crash testing may be voluntary to start with, rules could be made more stringent once sufficient capacities for such testing are made available.

The testing protocol of Bharat NCAP is proposed to be aligned with global crash test protocols factoring in the existing Indian regulations, allowing OEMs to get their vehicles tested at India’s own in-house testing facilities.

At present, crash testing of vehicles is not mandatory but a few companies have got some of their vehicles tested at NCAP-accredited centres in Europe, particularly Germany, voluntarily, and a few others cars were shipped to Germany for testing.

With Indian NCAP in place, such crash testing could be done within the country at lot lower costs.

Results of crash testing would help buyers make informed decisions on which model of vehicles to buy.

Around 15-20 car models are already in the process of star ratings under the B-NCAP programme.