Hyundai launches road safety campaign

The country’s second largest car manufacturer, Hyundai Motor India (HMIL), rolled out a ‘Safe Move-Traffic Safety Campaign' as part of its CSR initiative. The initiative that has been taken up in sync with the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), aims to promote road and traffic safety habits amongst children.

Under the Traffic Safety Campaign, children will be educated on traffic safety through both online and offline engagements with the campaign mascot, Robocar Poli. Also developed is a Robocar Poli 26-episode animation series that will be aired on the TV channel, Hungama and will be telecast in English, Hindi and Tamil to further propagate the message of road safety.

In addition, special school contact and residential welfare association programmes have been lined up spread the traffic safety message across five cities initially including  Delhi, Mumbai, Chennai, Kolkata and Ahmedabad. The special school contact programme will reach out to 40 schools in these cities. ‘TruDO’ , an interactive board game using flash cards, will make sessions more interactive and improve the recall value among school children. The RWA contact programme on the other hand will be rolled out in over 200 residential units in five cities. Interactive sessions will involve games and traffic lessons on safety for both children and parents.

Kids Hyundai, a specially designed website on traffic safety, has also been developed for children. It will serve as an extension of the 'Safe Move' initiative and carry news, animation episodes, online engagements, car production, car history and evolution-related content and registration for the various programmes under the campaign.

Actor Shah Rukh Khan is the brand ambassador for the campaign. Nitin Gadkari, Union minister of Road Transport, Highways and Shipping, who flagged off the campaign said that every year the vehicle density in the country is increasing by 10 per cent, adding to the traffic congestion on the roads. In 2013 alone, there were 5,00,000 road accidents with one death happening every four minutes, mostly in the age group of 5-44 years. The loss accruing on account of road accidents was to the tune of Rs 55,000 crore and accounted for 3 per cent of the GDP of the country.

To decongest the road infrastructure, he said the Ministry is increasing the length of the national highways from 96,000km to 1,50,000km. To enable diversification of traffic, four-laning of roads is being undertaken. In addition, the development of road infrastructure has been speeded up under the new government from 2km per day to 18km daily. This would be further augmented by up to 30km by end- March 2016.

“We are also in the process of identifying accident spots and establishing driver training institutes to give professional training to drivers. About 15-20 centres have already been started. More will follow. The Ministry is also setting up skill development and driver training centres in rural areas to give jobs to youth.”
Citing that last year Sweden had reported a single accident, Gadkari said the Road Transport Ministry is  looking to reduce accidents by 50 per cent with traffic safety initiatives inviting more corporates to promote the cause. Elaborating on the steps taken to promote road safety, Vijay Chibber, secretary, Department of Road Transport and Highways, asked Bollywood to promote the use of helmets while filming two-wheeler riding shots.

YK Koo, who has recently taken over as the MD of HMIL, emphasised the importance of road safety education and interactive sessions for children on the topic to generate awareness from an early age. “Children are the future of a nation and the traffic safety campaign is an effort to reach out to the children to educate them with best practices of the traffic safety.”