Over July and August, I have received tremendous support to spread the awareness about road safety and encourage proactive driving habits. I conducted sessions on proactive driving at Uptycs, Simplify3X, SLN Technologies, Resurrection School and Christ University (Hosur Road). In addition, I teamed up with Give Way Foundation and Muskaan Foundation to take the message across to schools and school drivers.
At Uptycs we had ~30 attendees. “Thanks for the important and engaging presentation – I am echoing the sentiments of the whole team”. Chetan Vinchchi took an extra step to locate some interesting videos of bad road behaviour ( wrong side driving, lack of lane discipline, speed ) and reinforced the message. Thanks to Chethan and Rajesh for organizing this.
At Simplify3X, I was happy to see 138 people in attendance! Since they stayed through my 1 hour talk, I am hopeful that it would have made some impact. Some of them jotted down notes and shared them with me as well as the entire team! “We learnt a lot of things we were not aware of!”. Thanks to Nagaraj, Urmila, and Anushia for all the support.
At SLN Technologies, I did the session in person. We had about 40 staff in attendance. Some of them shared their own narrow escapes. One of them also summarised the key points from my talk. Thanks to DRS and Nagesh for coordinating this. My old college friend, Gautam Doshi, came over to witness this talk. Gautam’s comment to me was “It was well delivered and superbly impactful. I am so touched by your dedication to spread the awareness .. gently!!”
The Muskaan Foundation for Road Safety has been doing stellar work in raising awareness of safe habits to improve road safety. In a first, they conducted a session in Kannada for bus drivers and attendants from 4 schools in Bangalore. We helped the Muskaan foundation create the material in Kannada and Suresh from Give Way Foundation helped to deliver it in Kannada.
Thanks to Netradyne whose CSR program supported this initiative. For more information, see https://tinyurl.com/MuskaanBLREvent
As we did in 2024, we have teamed up with Suresh Kumar and the Give Way Foundation to conduct a Road Safety Program with the students of Resurrection School, Indiranagar. The principal, Sister Nirmala, has given us whole hearted support. 53 students from Std IX are part of this cohort. We will engage these students over 6 sessions to expose them to various aspects and build a positive attitude towards road safety.
At Christ University, this is the beginning of a longer association. The opening session was attended by ~45 volunteers from Centre for Academic and Professional Support (CAPS) and Centre for Social Action (CSA). This was to sensitise the volunteers themselves. They now have a better understanding of the magnitude of the problem, the various causes of crashes, and key elements of proactive driving. They will further develop a program to reach out to other students of Christ University, and the students of the schools that they work with as part of CSA. The B.Ed. students voiced an interest in incorporating some road safety training into the schools. We will support them in this.
A couple of students shared their immediate reactions “I will not use phone when driving”, “I did not know much about road safety, so this event was an eye opener to me and it will influence others as well”.
Thanks to Divya and Alekhya for all the groundwork and I look forward to the action plan from these volunteers.
I am extremely thankful to our well wishers and supporters who have helped spread the word on road safety.
