India is a rapidly growing developing country and plays a substantial role in the global economy. To foster this growth, India has an ambitious and aggressive development programme (Sengupta 2012). Roads are important for economic growth, and by March 2011, India had 4.7 million kilometres of roads (ranked fourth in the world in terms of total road length) with an average road density of 1.4 km per km2 (MoRTH 2011). The number of vehicles on India’s roads is set to quadruple from just over 100 million in March 2011 to 450 million by 2020 (India Transport Portal 2012). India is the second most populated country in the world and is home to four of the world’s 25 biodiversity hotspots (Myers et al. 2000). It has a large network of protected areas (PA) as well as important areas for conservation outside PA, all of which are traversed by a network of roads. Studies on the impacts of roads on wildlife in India has primarily focused on documenting the rates of roadkill, with a few quantifying the barrier effects of roads on large fauna (Prakash 2012) and the effects of night‐time traffic on smaller fauna (Vijaykumar et al. 2001; Seshadri & Ganesh 2011). The Indian government has only recently officially recognised the impacts of roads on wildlife. The National Board for Wildlife commissioned a report (Raman 2011) to highlight the problem and developed a framework for mitigation. Raman (2011) identified poor enforcement of existing legislation and disregard for standard procedures as major issues and emphasised the need for a national policy for implementing ecologically and socially sound infrastructure. Despite the recognition of the seriousness of road‐related problems, numerous religious, social and development pressures also hinder ecologically sound road construction and management. In this chapter, we describe examples, mostly from the biodiversity hotspot of the Western Ghats, where attempts were made to understand and mitigate the wildlife conservation problems caused by roads.