Catching them young for safer mobility
“Accidents are killing more people in India than terrorism or natural disasters and yet we never talk about them,” observed the Minister for Road Transport and Highways in 2016.
Road accidents are the leading cause of death among people between the ages of 15 and 29 years and cost governments between 3% and 5% of the GDP. Road accidents disproportionately target the economically active. Families are often driven deeper into poverty by the loss of a bread winner or by expenses of prolonged medical care or the added burden of caring for a family member who is disabled from a road traffic injury. At a national level these costs hurt, imposing a significant burden on health, insurance and legal systems. Despite this massive – and largely preventable – human and economic toll, investment in addressing this global issue has been insufficient.
Safety is a core value for bp and drives how we do business. Keeping people safe on the road is a priority. Leveraging the work done globally and closer to home by Castrol in the space of safer mobility, bp is committed to supporting India to meet the Brasilia Declaration on Road Safety commitment of halving deaths in road accidents by 2022. The SCCRS vision if well executed has the potential to have a sustainable and high impact on the efforts toward safer mobility solutions for India.
Road safety course
bp India partnered with Synergie (the Synergie Institute of Trade, Commerce and Industry), to develop a comprehensive outcome-oriented road safety course for primary, secondary and senior secondary school children across India. Its eight interactive modules are tailored for each age group and provide instructors with student workbooks, teacher guides, infographics and videos, facilitating the movement from awareness to change in behaviour. This approach is underpinned by considerable research which tries to answer the question: why doesn’t intent convert to action?
Emphasizing safety in vocational training
In India, almost 75,000 people die every year in factory accidents. The number of people injured is much higher at 700,000. Increased mechanization, electrification and process sophistication have made industrial jobs more complex and a lot more dangerous. Accidents have led to losses of production time equivalent to millions of man and machine hours. Ignoring the importance of safety often leads to either the individuals harming themselves or others or causing damage to the equipment resulting in downtime and loss.
The government of India offers technical training through industrial training institutes (ITI) and through the National Skill Development Corporation’s (NSDC) training institutes. These institutes are the largest feeders of skilled manpower into the secondary sector (industrial and manufacturing sector), skilling more than 5 million students in a year. Ensuring that the country’s skilled workforce is trained to see safety as a priority, is critical for a long lasting and profitable energy relationship in the country.
bp partnered with the International Centre for Entrepreneurship and Career Development (ICECD) to run a pilot and capacity building program in collaboration with the government of Gujarat - developing a revised and industry-relevant safety module which would be integrated into the curriculum in the ITIs. A capacity building programme was then run across Gujarat, a state that has 500 of the 12,000 ITIs in India. The NSDC imparts training to enable employability in young people through 8,503 training centres, 443 training partner organizations across 40 sectors.
Safety skills training
bp, in partnership with Social Empowerment and Economic Development Society (SEEDS) and ILFS Skills, incorporated safety skills modules into vocational training programmes in manufacturing, engineering and construction sectors of the NSDC. A total of 13,000 students in 11 states received this training over the past few years. Additionally, our partners created a cadre of Master Trainers within the Capital Goods Sector Skill Council of the NSDC, who will sustain this safety skilling initiative in the future.
