Goa is commissioning a new pedestrian movement audit even as recommendations from a broader road safety audit completed in 2024 remain far from fully implemented. The contrast points to a central weakness in the state’s road-safety system: identifying risks is becoming more structured, but converting those findings into funded, coordinated improvements remains difficult.
The public works department (PWD) has awarded a Hyderabad-based firm, Aarvee Engineering Consultants, a Rs 2.2 crore contract for the pedestrian movement audit. The exercise will examine safety, accessibility and walkability along footpaths on roads across Goa. It will look at practical conditions that determine whether people can walk safely, including footpath width, continuity, surface quality and obstructions such as utility poles and electricity transformers.
The audit will also examine poor lighting, points where pedestrians and vehicles come into conflict, traffic-signal timings and whether infrastructure works for people using wheelchairs or pushing strollers. These details shift the focus from roads as carriageways for vehicles to roads as public spaces used by people with different levels of mobility.
That shift is important because the earlier road safety audit had a much broader engineering scope. Conducted by Gujarat-based Concius Engineering Services, it covered about 1,134km of major district roads and approximately 4,430km of village roads, excluding national highways. The survey examined road geometry, overtaking distance, stopping distance and curvature, as well as the visibility and placement of signs and the dimensions of speed breakers.
The 2024 audit was commissioned after Goa chief minister Pramod Sawant highlighted the rise in accidents and called for a detailed review of road safety in 2022. Its findings, according to a PWD official quoted by the Times of India, have generated recommendations extensive enough to occupy two cupboards. The official described the report as comprehensive but said that implementing all its recommendations across Goa would require around Rs 300 crore.
This creates a familiar infrastructure dilemma. An audit can identify unsafe curves, inadequate signs, poor visibility, unsuitable speed breakers and other risks. But the audit itself does not repair a road, redesign a junction or create a continuous footpath. Those actions require capital funding, design decisions, coordination with utility agencies and a mechanism for ensuring that safety requirements are not dropped when road works are tendered or executed.
The PWD’s stated response has been to implement recommendations incrementally. A memorandum has reportedly been issued to PWD engineers directing them to refer to the audit whenever resurfacing or other work is taken up on a particular stretch. Engineers are expected to incorporate the relevant safety measures into those projects wherever possible.
This approach links safety improvements to the timing of routine works. It may allow the department to address some recommendations without funding the entire Rs 300 crore requirement at once. It also means, however, that the pace of implementation depends on when individual road stretches are resurfaced or otherwise upgraded. The source material does not establish a consolidated schedule, annual allocation or public tracking system for the recommendations.
That distinction matters. A road safety audit is generally most valuable when its findings become part of the asset-management cycle: identifying a defect, assigning responsibility, estimating cost, prioritising interventions and recording completion. In Goa’s case, the PWD has indicated that some of this process will happen through project-by-project implementation. But the information available does not show how the recommendations have been ranked by risk, how many have been completed or which locations remain the most urgent.
The scale of the audited network makes prioritisation unavoidable. The 2024 road safety audit covered roughly 5,564km of major district and village roads combined, based on the distances cited by the PWD. The department says full implementation would cost about Rs 300 crore. That places the challenge beyond a single junction or corridor: it is a state-wide programme involving a large network with different road functions, traffic conditions and levels of pedestrian activity.
The decision to commission a separate pedestrian movement audit adds another layer to this system. The road safety audit reviewed technical and operational features such as geometry, stopping distance, signage and speed breakers. The pedestrian audit is intended to assess whether people can move along and across roads safely and whether the infrastructure accommodates those with mobility constraints.
These are related but distinct questions. A road can meet certain vehicle-movement or engineering requirements and still be difficult or unsafe to use on foot. A footpath may exist but lose continuity at a property entrance, be blocked by a utility installation or become unusable because of poor surface conditions. A crossing may be present but poorly aligned with pedestrian movement. The new audit’s stated scope recognises that road safety is not limited to vehicle crashes; it also includes the everyday accessibility of the street.
The reference to wheelchairs and strollers is particularly significant because it introduces a test of usable access rather than nominal provision. The source does not provide findings from the pedestrian audit because the exercise is still being undertaken. It therefore cannot yet establish how many footpaths fail these standards, which locations are most affected or what the eventual cost of improvements will be.
The two audits also raise a question about the sequence of public spending. Goa has committed Rs 4.5 crore to the earlier road safety audit and Rs 2.2 crore to the pedestrian movement audit, a combined consultancy expenditure of Rs 6.7 crore. Consultancy is necessary to understand conditions across a large and varied network, but the public value of these exercises ultimately depends on the department’s ability to act on their findings.
The available information does not suggest that the new pedestrian audit is unnecessary. On the contrary, it covers issues that the earlier audit may not have examined in the same way. But it does show that the state is building a stronger diagnostic base while facing a funding constraint on implementation. The institutional question is how audit findings from different exercises will be combined into one investment and enforcement programme rather than remaining in separate reports.
The PWD is the central agency identified in the report. Its engineers will use the earlier recommendations when undertaking resurfacing and other works. Yet road safety interventions can involve more than the surface of a road. Lighting, traffic signals, utility poles, electricity transformers, signage and pedestrian access may involve different agencies or operational budgets. The supplied material does not specify how these responsibilities are being coordinated.
That absence is important because pedestrian conditions are often created at the boundaries between agencies. A footpath can be affected by utility infrastructure, road design, traffic management and adjacent development. If each issue is handled separately, a new footpath may still be interrupted by a pole, a crossing may not align with signal timings, or a resurfaced road may retain an unsafe junction design. The pedestrian audit’s value will therefore depend not only on the quality of its survey but also on how its recommendations are assigned and financed.
Goa’s stated implementation method—adding recommendations when a road is resurfaced or otherwise taken up—may be practical under fiscal constraints. It also creates a need for transparent prioritisation. The source material records the department’s estimate that complete implementation would require Rs 300 crore, but it does not identify a phased budget, completion targets or a public dashboard. Without such information, it will be difficult for residents to know whether the most dangerous locations are being addressed first or whether improvements are occurring mainly where works were already scheduled.
The issue is not limited to Goa. Across urban and regional road networks, safety reviews can produce long lists of technically sound interventions that compete with resurfacing, widening, drainage, utility and traffic-management priorities. When funding is limited, the difference between a report and a safety programme lies in the ability to rank risks and protect funding for the highest-priority measures.
In Goa, the evidence currently establishes three stages of the process. The state has completed a wide-ranging road safety audit. It has not fully implemented the resulting recommendations because of the estimated cost and has chosen a piecemeal approach linked to future road works. It is now undertaking a separate audit focused on pedestrian movement, accessibility and walkability.
What remains unclear is how the two sets of recommendations will be reconciled, how the Rs 300 crore requirement has been calculated in detail, which measures have already been completed and when the pedestrian audit will produce an actionable implementation plan. Those details will determine whether the new exercise strengthens road safety policy or adds another report to an already substantial body of findings.
The next measurable step is the completion of the pedestrian movement audit and the department’s response to its recommendations. For Goa’s residents, the significance will lie not only in the findings but in whether they are translated into continuous footpaths, safer crossings, better lighting, corrected conflict points and road designs that protect people who walk or use mobility aids.
