This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
Earlier in February, an Indian politician urged the country’s Parliament to support homegrown alternatives to Google Maps – blaming the popular navigation app for fatal accidents.
“Incidents due to Google Maps errors in India are becoming a more and more serious issue,” Ajeet Madhavrao Gopchade said. “These incidents highlight that directions on Google Maps are not always correct.”
Gopchade mentioned two accidents: one from November 2024, in which three men died in the north Indian state of Uttar Pradesh after their car veered off an under-construction bridge, and another from October 2023, when two doctors from Kerala lost their lives by following the navigation app to a river they mistook for a waterlogged street.
These are among a series of reported misdirections involving Google Maps in India. In 2024, three people had to be rescued from a canal in Uttar Pradesh after they followed driving directions on the app. A car in Tamil Nadu landed at a flight of stairs when its driver opted for the “fastest route” on Google Maps, and a family traveling from Bihar to Goa wound up stranded in a forest in Karnataka.
Google Maps is the most-used navigation app by consumers in India, with millions of daily users and an average of 50 million searches in multiple languages each day. The country is also home to Google Maps’ largest network of contributors – around 60 million people who add content such as reviews, photos, and road updates. Yet, the inconsistent quality of its data has brought the app under scrutiny.
Digital mapping experts, however, believe these incidents are not specific to Google Maps and instead reveal systemic challenges to mapping Indian roads.
Maintaining precision is daunting for any navigation app in India since road names and addresses are not standardised, according to Muskan Thareja, a geospatial technology expert who previously worked at geoanalytics company GeoSpoc, which was acquired by Ola in 2021.
“Some houses have a house number, but [a] majority of the houses do not,” Thareja told Rest of World. “Google already has some coding around it but it’s not really very applicable in India, so that is where the majority of the problem lies.”
Lalitha Ramani, general manager for Google Maps India, told Rest of World the company has been undertaking several initiatives within the country to “make navigation and exploration journeys more efficient and sustainable”.
When Google Maps launched in India in 2008, it initially struggled due to the lack of street names, which were the foundation of its technology globally. In an X post from October 2023, Elizabeth Laraki, who led the global design team for Google Maps from 2007 to 2009, wrote that this rendered the app’s directions “pretty much useless.” The company subsequently used parks, monuments, shopping centers, landmark buildings, and gas stations to confirm directions instead.
Over the years, Google has launched several new features to improve Maps in India, including voice navigation and transliterated directions in about nine and 10 languages, respectively, to increase accessibility. Most recently, in 2024, the company introduced a simplified interface for reporting road incidents, two new weather-related alerts for streets obscured by flooding or fog, an artificial-intelligence model that estimates road widths, and a feature that alerts users to approaching overpasses in 40 cities.
Google has mapped 300 million buildings, 35 million businesses and places, and streets stretching across 7 million kilometres in India, Ramani told Rest of World.
India has been “an innovation hub for Google Maps,” since many features saw “their genesis in the country”, Ramani said. She cited examples such as landmark-based navigation, offline maps, and two-wheeler mode, which debuted in India.
“[We] rely on our AI tech, data from local agencies and government partners, Street View, and satellite images, in addition to our active community of contributors, enabling millions of updates a day,” Ramani added. “There remains work to do, and it’s something we’re always working to improve.” She did not respond to queries on specific incidents related to misdirection reported in recent years.
The navigation problems are not specific to India. In September 2022, a man died after Google Maps led him to a collapsed bridge in North Carolina, US. His family sued the company for negligence a year later, noting in a lawsuit that the tech giant had not updated its directions even though users had flagged the risks of the bridge multiple times. In November 2023, Google apologised after dozens of drivers were led down a dirt path to a desert in California. In December 2020, a Russian motorist reportedly froze to death when his car broke down on a dangerous road to which the app had directed him.
Within India, Google Maps contends with the homegrown MapmyIndia and Ola Maps. MapmyIndia, which has mapped nearly as many roads as Google Maps, is reportedly the market leader in providing navigation services to car manufacturers.
In July 2024, Ola CEO Bhavish Aggarwal announced that his ride-hailing company had transitioned away from Google Maps to its in-house navigation platform – a move that he said would save $1 billion. On X, he encouraged developers to “#ExitGoogleMaps” for Ola Maps, promising a year’s worth of free access. By December, Google, too, had introduced a range of price cuts for Indian developers.
In Uttar Pradesh, Google Maps wasn’t the only app that failed to register the under-construction bridge from the lethal accident, according to a post by remote-sensing expert Raj Bhagat Palanichamy on X. The route also appeared on Mappls, owned by MapmyIndia – the company did not respond to an interview request.
Such issues persist because crowdsourced data on navigation apps gets distorted with illegal driving – like when vehicles don’t follow one-way signs – Dhyey Zala, who is part of Ola Maps’ routing team, told Rest of World. While user-generated incident reports could combat these issues, Thareja said their efficacy is limited by issues of digital literacy.
Users also complain that Google Maps rejects suggested edits.
Nityanand Pattnaik, a senior manager at the Navi Mumbai International Airport, told Rest of World he has submitted more than half a dozen forms over the past three years to amend misinformation on Google Maps about the route to the airport, but to no avail.
“This area is totally dynamic and changes frequently but there are certain access roads which is used to reach this place. I had tried to add the missing road, but it is rejected every time,” Pattnaik wrote to Google in an email trail from December, which he shared with Rest of World.
Google was denied government permission to introduce Street View – which includes cars equipped with cameras on their roofs for visual mapping – until 2022, when a new geospatial policy allowed the company to do so if it didn’t own the imagery data. It partnered with Indian IT company Tech Mahindra and mapping firm Genesys, launching Street View in 10 cities. According to a December 2023 news report, Street View’s coverage of India has since expanded to 3,000 cities. The last census in 2011 recorded about 8,000 cities and towns, and nearly 650,000 villages in the country.
Google did not provide specific information on the frequency of its surveys or updates for Google Maps.
Google should not be held liable because it is “not a public utility,” Arnav Gupta, who has worked as a product engineer at companies including Meta, JioCinema, and Zomato, told Rest of World, referring to the police complaint from the November 2024 accident. Much of the onus of keeping firms and citizens in the loop falls on local government agencies, he said.
Elsewhere in the world, like Singapore and London, transport authorities have closely worked with Google, Gupta said, recommending a similar approach in India. In recent years, Google has partnered with traffic authorities in select cities to source information on road disruptions, Ramani said. This includes major events like the G20 summit and the Cricket World Cup in 2023, and the ongoing Kumbh Mela, among the world’s biggest religious gatherings.
“The success of these collaborations depends on the quality, consistency, and timeliness of data — crucial for real-time reporting of road incidents, crashes, and closures,” Piyush Tewari, who heads the road-safety nongovernmental organization SaveLife, told Rest of World.
Ananya Bhattacharya is a reporter for Rest of World covering South Asia's tech scene. She is based in Mumbai, India.
This article was originally published in Rest of World, which covers technology’s impact outside the West.
