MoRTH Organise Conference On Safer Mobility, Promote Road-Safety

Ministry of Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH), Indian Roads Safety Campaign (IRSC), DTP and TRIPP, IIT Delhi organised a conference on safer mobility titled 'A Road to Safer Mobility' today in IIT Delhi with a view to promote collaboration among multiple stakeholders working across the domain, to promote road-safety across India. Nitin Gadkari, Union Minister for Road Transport and Highways (MoRTH) through a video message emphasized on changes made by the government in the direction of road safety. He focussed on following traffic rules and appreciated the IRSC team for its initiatives. Other key speakers included V. Ramgopal Rao, Director, IIT Delhi, Abhay Damle, the Joint Secretary of MoRTH and Amar Srivastava, Founder, IRSC.

Also Read: Indian Roads to Get Safer; Deaths to go Down by 1/5th Every Year

The conference was divided into three sessions- 'Government: Point of View', 'Contribution of Industries' and 'Initiatives taken by NGOs'.

The first session- Government: Point of View had Amit Bhardwaj from Niti Aayog; Dr. Sushma Sagar, senior surgeon at AIIMS trauma center; Mr. Arun Mohan, Senior advocate at Delhi high court; Mr. Vijay Singh, DCP of Delhi Traffic Police and Maj. Gen. Dilawar Singh, Director of NYKS and Ministry of Youth affairs and Sports as speakers. Each panellist spoke about the various initiatives taken up by the government bodies that they represented and how they plan to tackle the road safety issue. There was a discussion on collaborating all the efforts by the police, the healthcare department, the education department and all the other departments to achieve a common goal. The involvement of youth in these initiatives was stressed upon.

The second session on the contribution of industries and was moderated by Bhairavi Singh, principal anchor at NDTV. The speakers were- Vijay Kalakala, deputy general manager at Mercedes-Benz, R&D India, Shyam Sundar, Head HSSE Nokia, India; Navdeep Singh Mehram, Head of sustainability, Diageo India; Kuldeep Agarwal, Head of CSR at Indus towers and Ashwin Kak from AbInbeV. The discussion started off with issues regarding the Motor Vehicle Act. It then went on to cover the various initiatives taken up by the corporative and the effectiveness of the CSR campaigns. In the end, solutions were presented and everyone agreed that data analysis and collection is should be the primary focus.

The third session- 'Initiatives Taken By NGOs' was conducted on the initiatives taken by NGOs. It was moderated by Ambika Singh, anchor, NDTV. The speakers were Anurag Kulshrestha, president of TRAX; Prerana Arora, head of road safety center at SPUU; Aditya Nayan, director at Safe life foundation; Vinod Kanumana, president at IFROS and Veena Naabar; CEO at IRF India Chapter. The discussion focussed on the work done by the various NGOs across the world and their scope. The need to work as a single team with a single focus of road safety was stressed by the panellists.

Abhay Damle launched the IRSC booklet containing laws and traffic regulations in a simplified form. Throwing light on government's approach towards Vision Zero, he spoke on how science and technology are the primary solutions for road safety and talked about going from safe-fail towards fail-safe systems. He mentioned the 3 -second rule and the need to relook, 120 kmph+ speeds. He also focused on prevention and the problems to be tackled regarding helmet design, airbags and seatbelts.