India’s roads are famously unsafe, with the country leading the world in road accident deaths. According to the World Health Organisation, India’s roads see more than 425 fatalities a day. And although it is home to just 1% of the vehicles in the world, it accounts for 11% of all global road accidents.

Despite having such a high number of fatalities, road safety has remained a low priority for policymakers. So Dainik Jagran took matters into its own hands and launched its own road safety campaign.

Staff identified the three things every driver in India needs as they venture onto the roads and named the campaign accordingly: Good Horns, Good Brakes, Good Luck.

The reasons behind the numbers

What makes India’s roads so dangerous?

Several factors work together to create the perfect storm for accident fatalities. About 83% of the country’s road accident deaths are caused by speeding and careless driving. Overall, drivers show little interest in observing such things as safety precautions, the effect of poor weather conditions, insufficient road designs, and ensuring their vehicles have adequate safety features.

Although the government created two committees — the National Road Safety Council and the District Road Safety Committee — to analyse the accidents, learn more about their causes, and create new road safety plans, this didn’t create lasting change. In addition to a lack of enforcement of the rules, India’s unique traffic situation sees the roads being shared by dozens of different types of transportation that range from cows and elephants to rickshaws and SUVs.

Setting a new agenda

To call attention to the problem and to nudge both government and citizens to take the problem seriously, Dainik Jagran identified what it saw as the three main elements of road safety:

• Education: Drivers needed to become more aware of road safety practices.
• Enforcement: Quite simply, the laws needed to be upheld.
• Engineering: Improving the road design, eliminating spots that are well-known for accidents, and creating appropriate signage were necessary.  

To drive the point home, Dainik Jagran assigned 750 reporters to the campaign and created an ambitious agenda that would audit the highways and spotlight engineering flaws, while at the same time educating citizens about road safety and encouraging the government to become more proactive about enforcing traffic laws.

The team audited 182 highways that covered some 79,657 kilometres and gathered data based on the following parameters:

• Accident prone.
• Maintenance.
• Signage.
• Fog patches.
• Stray animals.
• Civic amenities.
• Proximity to trauma centres.

They then held nearly 4,500 workshops that reached some 130,000 drivers and educated them on road safety and the potential hazards faced on the road. Traffic police also participated, conducting workshops in schools that were attended by 2.7 million children, who then shared their learnings with their parents and neighbours.

To augment those in-person events, Dainik Jagran created a special content campaign that included 827 articles published by traffic and road safety efforts, 15,000 articles published to raise public awareness about the issue of road safety, and 1,200 published interviews with experts, policymakers, and administrators.

Reaching the audience

The campaign significantly impacted citizens, with 58 million people taking the oath on road safety. Local government administrative departments wrote letters to their officers, urging them to participate in the campaign and to help rally citizens within their jurisdictions to participate in the road safety oath ceremonies.

It proved to be a powerful first step in cutting the number of global deaths and injuries from road traffic accidents and improving road safety in India. 

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