The country’s leading car-maker Maruti Suzuki India is aiming to more than double its driving schools to 400 by 2014, to train larger number of people on road safety.
The company has a network of 6 Institutes of Driving and Traffic Research (IDTR) and 192 Maruti driving schools. Various state governments have joined hands with MSI in setting up IDTRs and institutionalising driving training in the country.
The company has already trained 10 lakh people in the last decade, out of which 5 lakh have been trained under its flagship programme — National Road Safety Mission (NRSM), which was launched in December 2008.
“The milestone of training 500,000 people in safe driving is only a humble beginning, compared to the scale of the issue. The scale can be gauged from the latest report compiled by International Road Federation, which states that India loses close to about Rs. 100,000 Crore every year in road accidents. In terms of fatalities, around 160,000 lives are lost annually in road accidents. As the automobile sector continues to grow, there is a need to bring in high quality training institutes, which help institutionalize high `quality training’ on road safety. This requires a 360-degree approach and involvement of several bodies. We hope to be the catalyst for other organizations to join the road safety efforts,” Mr. Mayank Pareek, Managing Executive Office, Marketing and Sales, Maruti Suzuki, said.
This initiative by Maruti is a peculiar and a good hearted one. Through setting up driving schools driving skills can be trained in a better way so as to reduce the number of death defying accidents around the country which take the lives a number of people everyday.
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