Supreme Court To Govt: Keep Cows Off Highways
The Supreme Court has issued a formal notice to the central government and all state and Union Territory administrations to respond to a plea seeking the removal of stray cattle from national and state highways. A bench comprising Justices Vikram Nath and Sandeep Mehta issued the notice on April 6, 2026, giving authorities four weeks to respond. The petition was filed by Lawyers For Human Rights International.
The plea asks for uniform national guidelines for cattle management on highways, mandatory fencing of national highways and expressways, and particularly on accident-prone stretches. It also demands the establishment of scientifically managed cattle shelters with earmarked government funding, strict penalties for the illegal abandonment of cattle, and a no-fault compensation mechanism for victims of highway accidents caused by stray animals.
The numbers behind the petition are not trivial. Stray cattle are estimated to account for approximately 5 percent of all road accidents on highways. In Haryana alone, more than 900 deaths were caused by cattle on roads between 2018 and 2022. In Chhattisgarh, 404 people died and 129 were seriously injured in vehicle collisions with cattle in a two-year period. In Madhya Pradesh, 237 stray-cattle road accidents resulted in 94 deaths and 133 injuries across a two-year window, averaging a major casualty every three days. Nationally, NCRB data points to approximately 2,500 cattle-related road fatalities per year.
These are nighttime accidents predominantly. Cattle on highways at night are almost invisible until a vehicle is within braking distance. Two-wheeler riders are the most exposed, since they cannot swerve as effectively as a car and have less structural protection on impact. High-speed expressways, where vehicles travel at 100 to 120 kmph, are where these encounters are most lethal.
The physics of these crashes explains why they are often fatal. At expressway speeds, braking distance rises sharply, and the problem becomes worse when the animal is stationary, dark-coloured, or standing just beyond the range of headlamp visibility. A car may have crumple zones and airbags, but a two-wheeler rider has almost no protection in a direct impact. Even for larger vehicles, swerving to avoid cattle can lead to rollover crashes, median hits, or collisions with oncoming traffic. So the risk is not limited to striking the animal itself. It also comes from panic reactions at high speed.
The root cause is multi-layered. Stricter cow slaughter restrictions enforced from 2014 onwards resulted in a sharp rise in abandoned cattle, since farmers who could no longer sell aged or unproductive animals chose to let them loose instead.
The national stray cattle population now stands at over 5 million, according to the 20th Livestock Census. Gaushalas exist in most states but do not have the capacity to absorb this volume. Madhya Pradesh has approximately 3,000 gaushalas housing 4.5 lakh cattle. The animals on highways are mostly those that no shelter has taken in.
That gap between the number of stray animals and the capacity of shelters is at the centre of the crisis. Even if a state has thousands of gaushalas, the available space is often far below the actual number of abandoned cattle moving through rural edges, peri-urban roads, and highway corridors.
The issue also becomes more serious after harvest cycles, when some animals are left to roam freely and later drift towards roads, service lanes, and highway shoulders in search of food. Once that happens, highway authorities, local bodies, police, and animal husbandry departments often end up passing responsibility between one another, which is why the problem has remained unresolved for years.
The Supreme Court's notice requires the government to now respond formally, which means a detailed plan or at minimum a status report on existing measures must be filed. Whether this produces enforceable action, such as compulsory fencing on high-speed corridors or state-wise cattle management budgets, will depend on what the court directs after reviewing those responses.
A uniform framework would matter because the highway network cuts across multiple administrative systems. National highways may be under one authority, adjoining service roads may be controlled by local bodies, and cattle capture or sheltering may fall under state departments.
Without clearly assigned responsibility, accident prevention becomes patchy and reactive. If the court pushes for fencing on vulnerable corridors, dedicated cattle shelters, and a compensation mechanism for victims, the case could force the issue out of the realm of local complaints and into a national road-safety framework.
For drivers and riders who use national highways regularly, the notice represents the first time a binding judicial process has been attached to a problem that has existed for over a decade.