Goodyear India and IRTE promote road safety awareness through driver training programme

In a bid to promote safe driving in India, tyre major Goodyear India had introduced a road safety programme called ‘Safer Roads, Safer You’ in sync with the Institute of Road Traffic Education (IRTE) between December 2015 and March 2016.

The aim was to provide complementary training to a select 2,400 taxi drivers of mobile app-based taxi service Uber in Delhi-NCR and Mumbai and fleet operators.

A one-day workshop was conducted for groups of 20 taxi drivers to create awareness and spread the word about the critical aspects of defensive driving, passenger comfort and safety, vehicle maintenance, personal management and incident management. The participating drivers were also given an incentive of Rs 500 along with a complimentary accidental death insurance policy of Rs 200,000 and a certificate on successful completion of the workshop.

“With Safer Roads, Safer You, we hope to create a culture of safe driving and passenger care in the taxi service industry to help increase ridership of the public transportation system, thereby benefitting the fleet owners, taxi drivers, police organisation and end users,” said Rajeev Anand, vice-chairman and MD of Goodyear India. About 124 workshops were conducted during this period, each training about 20-25 drivers.

Stating that there are 142,000 fatalities and 2.6 million people seriously injured every year on Indian roads, along with 20 crore traffic violations occurring every day, Rohit Baluja, president of IRTE, spoke about the need to improve customer standards and reduce occurrences of traffic violations.

The motor vehicle industry has been growing annually at 10 percent yearly with a strength of 180 crore vehicles currently, of which 80 percent are two-wheelers in the absence of an efficient public transportation adding to the traffic chaos. Taxis, on the other hand, grew 100 percent in 2010-11 with 3,644 passengers in taxis dying in 2014.

A new handbook of regulations developed by IRTE enabled the trainee drivers to better understand their road problems and to deal with their passengers. A pre-test and post-test followed by a feedback mechanism was undertaken to gauge the understanding of the drivers after the training. Most of the drivers who undertook the training were in 36-50 year age group with 5 percent being uneducated, 6 percent being educated till the fifth standard, 5 percent being post-graduates and the majority being educated from sixth to 10^th standard.

Classroom and yoga sessions formed part of the training sessions. Baluja said that before starting the training, drivers who had 40 percent knowledge of traffic rules were found to have doubled their knowledge. A period of 6-8 months will be given to the drivers to assess their retention ability and this will be analysed through another feedback.

Kiran Bedi, former IPS officer, spoke about renaming drivers as road safety engineers and a government aided fund for a regular programme to train drivers. She suggested that young boys and girls staying in resettlement colonies, who are keen to be part of the driver setup, could be tapped. NGOs could collaborate to provide placement for drivers who could be further harbingers of road safety by identifying road violations. The government could award them a cash prize and a certificate for zeroing down on road violations and this in turn would boost the economy of the country.

Also read: Central govt proposes ambitious driver training institutes under 12th Five-Year Plan