CB Bureau
A national platform on road safety for students was organised by Toyota Kirloskar Motor (TKM) on February 9. A key part of its CSR on road safety, the Toyota Safety Education Program (TSEP) is an interactive learning programme targeted at school children in the age group of 10″14 years, educating them on the importance of road safety through a phase-wise approach. The platform creates motivational contests for students to showcase their road-safety learnings and projects, and helps evaluate the real-time learnings and applications by the state-level winners.
More than 300 school children participated in this programme, including from Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru. The event was attended by Eish Singhal, deputy commissioner of police – Delhi Traffic Police, Ramdeep Choudhary, deputy secretary (MoRTH), Kamal Singh, executive director – UNGCNI (UN Global Compact Network India), and Naveen Soni, vice president, Toyota Kirloskar Motor.
The programme’s objectives are to instil safe and responsible road behaviour, enhance awareness levels, and develop young road-safety ambassadors across the country. Toyota’s aim is to inculcate a road-safety culture in school children from classes 5 to 9 through various methodologies like classroom sessions and practical demonstrations. The awareness and behavioural changes are evaluated through various competitions like quiz, project work, and skit performances.
Toyota claims to have educated more than 710,000 school children on road safety across India to date. In the last phase, 30,000 students were covered across 61 schools in Delhi, Mumbai and Bengaluru.
TSEP was launched in 2007 followed by a new module roll-out in 2008. The new TSEP module is focused on bringing about change in attitudes among school children. The programme is an age-wise distribution of the know-hows on road safety.
Grade 9 students are encouraged to take up project-based activities, guided by teachers, to educate the general public on road safety. They are engaged in activities such as mimes, slogan writing, drawing competitions, classroom sessions, quiz competitions, manning traffic junctions, and teaching the learnings of TSEP to junior-class children and nearby schools. These projects are showcased on various platforms like parent”teacher meets, school assemblies, and public areas. Through these measures, TSEP hopes to influence the general public and the families of the children, setting an example through the actions of younger safety ambassadors and thereby bringing in a societal change through their safe actions on the road.
CB’s query on measuring the medium- to long-term impact of the awareness programmes on the children did not receive any response from the company.