Road
safety is an issue of universal concern, which affects everyone irrespective of
their age. Large number of Road crashes are happening because of Traffic Rules
Violations, which shows that the person behind the wheels is making the errors
resulting into crashes. Hence, the human beings are to be trained not only to
drive but also to become a responsible road user.
Over
speeding has been the leading cause of road crashes causing 72.5 percent of the
accidents followed by driving at roadside at 5.5 percent in 2020.
The
graph below depicts the Road Accidents by type of Traffic Rule Violation in
2020.
(Source: MoRTH Road Accident Report 2020)
From when a child is born,
roads play a crucial role, hence road safety education becomes important at the
initial stage. It is important to prioritize road safety education for personal
development and to meet the statutory requirements.
In
2020, most of the people who died on the Indian roads were between the age
group of 18-45 which means that the most productive age group is dying in the
road crashes.
In India, 3,66,138 accidents
took place in 2020 in which 1,31,714 people had to lose their life as per MoRTH
accident report 2020. We can see the increasing trend in accident severity
every year. In India, persons killed per 100 accidents was 29 in 2015 which has
shown an increasing trend and now has reached up to 36 in 2020. This shows that
more serious accidents are happening on the Indian roads with each passing
year. It is needed to educate everyone that road safety should not be taken
lightly, as it is a matter of life and death.
“Man behind the wheel
plays an important role in most of the crashes. In most of the cases, crashes
occurs either due to carelessness or due to lack of road safety awareness of
the road user. Hence, road safety education is as essential as any other basic
skills of survival.” - Ministry of Road Transport and Highways.
Road Safety Education is one
of the E’s of Road Safety which intersects all the other E’s viz. Engineering,
Enforcement and Emergency care. Road safety education is viewed as an efficient
way of avoiding road crashes among young road users ranging from pedestrians,
bicyclists, to adolescent novice drivers. Because a student learns the most in
the educational institution, say it school, college, or university, it is important
to make road safety part of curriculum.
“Road safety knowledge and
awareness will be created amongst the population through education, training
and publicity campaigns. Road safety education will also focus on school
children and college going students, while road safety publicity campaigns will
be used to propagate good road safety practices among the community. The
Government will encourage all professionals associated with road design, road
construction, road network management, traffic management and law enforcement
to attain adequate knowledge of road safety issues.” - National Road Safety Policy.
To inculcate road safety at
the school level, it is important to design a curriculum with age wise module.
The app-based and story-based teaching techniques can be introduced in the
curriculum irrespective of the board.
A virtual workshop is
proposed on December 16, 2022 to take the road safety education forward with
the objective to Develop the Pedagogy, Implementation of the curriculum at the
school level and auditing and evaluation of the same.
The stakeholders of the
workshop are Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, Ministry of Education,
Education Department of States, Education Boards and Schools.
To sign up, do get in touch with us at events@coers.in