An average driver training school is little more than a small office, a leaflet that lists out traffic signs and the dos and don’ts of driving and a handful of beaten down cars with many red ‘L’s and an extra set of foot pedals.
On a 25-acre plot of land, near a village called Waghodia, some 30km from Vadodara, Gujarat, is an institute called AGIDTTR. This alphabet soup, which stands for ‘All Gujarat Institute of Driving, Technical Training and Research’, was set-up as a public-private-partnership between the Ministry of Tribal Development (Gujarat) and Maruti Suzuki back in 2009 to train underprivileged members of scheduled tribes from nearby areas in driving skills, so as to boost their employability. The institute is a driver-training boarding school that arms its students not just with driving skills, but an array of soft skills too, including table manners, basic English-speaking, team work, workplace etiquette and general personality development, all free of cost.
The AGIDTTR campus is an expanse of lush green, interrupted by the main building, the workshop, the hostel and the training track. The main building houses classrooms for theoretical training, driving simulators and a technical lab to help students understand the various mechanical parts of a car, the workshop is used to help students understand how a car works and how minor repair jobs can be undertaken, the hostel houses their accommodation and dining hall and the training track is a 2.5-kilometre-long mix of bends, slopes, intersections and parallel-parking spaces designed to standards set by the British School of Motoring.
Students can undertake training courses for light motor vehicles (LMV), LMV commercial vehicles, heavy motor vehicles (HMV), HMV buses and forklifts. The fork lift programme is a particular matter of pride for Mahesh Rajoria, the Assistant Vice President (Driving Training), Maruti Suzuki. “Demand for trained fork lift operators is very high, so much that companies are forming a waiting list for our [fork lift] graduates,” he says enthusiastically. Each course also includes personality development in its curriculum, so that graduates are more than just drivers, they are complete employees.
The institute is more than just another exercise in CSR. Since its inception in 2009, the institute has enrolled 9,043 students in 100 batches, of which 6602 have been placed, an impressive placement rate of 73 percent, with employers including large multinationals such as Sun Pharmaceuticals and the Coca Cola Company.
While AGIDTTR might be biased towards tribal development, we are told that discussions to open up more driver-training boarding schools are in the pipelines at Maruti-Suzuki. Uttarakhand already plays home to one, and others might pop-up in different parts of the country over the next few years. This development is good news because of two reasons – Indian roads are associated with high accident rates, attributable largely to poorly trained drivers, and the logistics industry is blooming, driven by growth in delivery services and radio taxis. As more and more drivers ply our roads, institutes like AGIDTTR that work hard to ensure that these drivers are well-trained and competent, is welcome news indeed.