REPORT CARD OF BNCAP

There's something almost comical about perfection becoming routine.

- WORDS ANIRJIT HORE

Bharat NCAP, India's homegrown New Car Assessment Program, has already tested 24 cars, and the headline figures are striking: 21 of those scored five stars for adult occupant protection and 20 scored five stars for child safety. On the face of it, that's cause for celebration. Especially for a nation that has long been notorious for high road-fatality figures, but is finally seeing mass-market cars that can protect occupants in a crash. But it also forces a tougher question: have manufacturers genuinely lifted safety across the board, or have they simply learned to chase the test? The answer, as always, sits somewhere between policy, engineering and market dynamics.

Why the spike in five-star cars isn’t an accident.

The rapid rise in five-star results reflects a confluence of factors. First, regulatory pressure: over the last half-decade, India's rulebook for vehicles has become more exacting. The Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) and Automotive Industry Standards (AIS) have pushed features such as speed alerts, seat-belt reminders, ABS and airbags into mandatory status, and successive amendments have raised the bar on passive safety measures. That regulatory baseline means new cars arrive at Bharat NCAP with a better safety toolkit than they would have only a few years ago.