During a 40-minute ride on that highway, a tractor hauling gravel was seen driving the wrong way, a milk truck stopped in the road so its driver could urinate and motorists swerved to avoid a bicycle cart full of wooden tables in the fast lane. Drivers chatted on mobile phones as they steered stick-shift cars and wove across lanes. Side mirrors were often turned in or were nonexistent.

A cluster of women in saris holding small children waited anxiously for a gap in traffic so they could race across the highway. Opposite them, a group of young men in office attire waited to cross in the other direction.

The breakdown in road safety has many causes, experts say. Often, the police are too stretched to enforce existing traffic laws or take bribes to ignore them; heavy vehicles, pedestrians, bullock carts and bicycles share roadways; punishment for violators is lenient, delayed or nonexistent; and driver’s licenses are easy to get with a bribe.

Kamal Nath, India’s minister of road transport and highways, said in an interview that highway safety was a “priority” for the national government. “Road safety is one of the major issues” the ministry is addressing, he said. The ministry is reviewing the Motor Vehicles Act and, three years after a government-backed committee recommended that a national road safety board be established, it has introduced legislation to that effect in Parliament.

International safety experts say the Indian government has been slow to act. Bringing down road deaths “requires political commitment at the highest level,” said Dr. Etienne Krug, director of the department of violence and injury prevention at the World Health Organization. India’s government is “just waking up to the issue,” he said.

Mr. Nath, who was India’s commerce minister before moving to the Highway Ministry last year, has increased highway expansion plans and is raising $45 billion from private investors to extend India’s 3.3-million-kilometer, or 2-million-mile, road network. The expansion is an integral part of keeping the economy, now at about 9 percent growth a year, humming, Mr. Nath says.

Government planners warn that fatalities are unlikely to decline soon.

When highways are built, “there are always more accidents,” said Atul Kumar, chief general manager of road safety with the National Highways Authority of India, part of Mr. Nath’s ministry.