Piyush Tewari

Piyush Tewari is an Indian social entrepreneur working on road safety and emergency care, and the founder and chief executive of the SaveLIFE Foundation. He is best known for the campaign that produced India's first Good Samaritan law.

He had been working in private equity, latterly as managing director of the Indian operations of a US firm, when a young cousin was killed in a road crash in 2008. The boy's injuries were survivable; bystanders did not intervene because they feared being drawn into police and hospital procedures. Looking into it, Tewari found that more than a million people had been killed on Indian roads in the previous decade and that about half of those deaths were attributable to the absence of timely care, a figure the Law Commission of India had also recorded. He set up SaveLIFE Foundation on 29 February 2008.

The organisation began by training police officers and members of the public as first responders, then moved to changing the rules that discouraged them. Its petition to the Supreme Court secured legal protection for bystanders who help crash victims, institutionalised as a Good Samaritan law in 2016; it also obtained a ban in 2015 on trucks carrying protruding rods, and a road safety bill it recommended was passed by the Lok Sabha in 2017. Tewari then turned the organisation towards prevention, adopting the Mumbai-Pune Expressway as a demonstration corridor. Deaths on that road fell by 58 per cent between 2016 and 2023, and the approach has been extended to high-risk intersections and to a programme of a hundred corridors and districts. The foundation has set itself the target of saving a million lives by 2030.

Tewari holds a master's degree in public administration from Harvard. He was a Rolex Laureate in 2010, an Echoing Green fellow in 2012 and an Ashoka fellow in 2013, was named a Time Next Generation Leader in 2015 and a World Economic Forum Young Global Leader in 2019, and received the Elevate Prize in 2023 and the Skoll Award for Social Innovation in 2024.[2][3]