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In 2018, the Swedish and Indian governments signed an agreement to increase research and development exchange between the countries. Later, an India/Swedish triple-helix consortium was founded. In Sweden Volvo Group, Autoliv, Ericsson and Saab represent the industry and VTI, Chalmers and Rise represent the academy. Also, Swedish Transport Administration in connected. On the Indian side, Tech Mahindra (later exchanged by LTI Mindtree), Manipal Hospital, and ARAI represent the industry and the two universities Indian Institute of Technology and Indian Institute of Science represent the academy. The vision for the platform is: “To leverage the know-how of India and Sweden to accelerate progress and deployment of safe & sustainable transport solutions and actionable policies, contributing to significant progress of Indian transport system” . So far, several research projects have been identified within the platform.

The first project that has received funding from VINNOVA, “Safe and secure transport corridors in India” , aims to increase understanding how Indian intercity public transport by means of coaches could be made safer, more secure, and efficient. This is done by collecting and analyzing both existing and new data related to behavior of different road users (e.g., coach drivers, passengers, pedestrians) and efficiency (e.g., traffic flow, incident handling, fleet maintenance, rescue time). By utilizing both Swedish and Indian expertise, the project adopts existing methods and tools for data collection and analysis to Indian conditions and implement them in a few coaches operating in regular traffic between Indian cities. The expected results include a) scalable and re-usable methodology for data collection and analysis, b) initial understanding of safety, security, and efficiency challenges of intercity public transport by means of coaches, and c) examples of how these challenges could be addressed by utilizing existing or creating new solutions.