Bengaluru’s road safety challenge is increasingly being shaped not only by enforcement and infrastructure upgrades, but by a growing push for early education led from outside formal policy channels. A student-driven initiative, now operating across multiple Indian cities, is attempting to address a long-standing gap in how urban mobility risks are understood by children an intervention with implications for public health, civic behaviour and sustainable city planning.
India continues to record some of the highest road fatality figures globally, with urban centres bearing a disproportionate share of injuries involving pedestrians, cyclists and two-wheeler users. In Bengaluru, where rapid motorisation has outpaced street design and behavioural reform, planners say road safety education remains fragmented and largely absent from school curricula. This omission is increasingly viewed as a structural weakness in the city’s broader mobility strategy. The volunteer-led organisation, founded by a school-age road crash survivor, works directly with schools and child-care institutions to deliver age-appropriate road safety sessions. Its core approach focuses on everyday urban scenarios crossing multi-lane roads, navigating mixed traffic, and understanding vehicle blind spots rather than abstract rule-based instruction. Urban policy experts note that such experiential learning aligns with international best practices, where early education has been linked to long-term reductions in risky road behaviour.
Despite operating with fewer than two dozen volunteers nationwide, the initiative has built a presence in Bengaluru, Delhi and Surat, with remote support from students overseas. Its scale remains modest, but transport researchers argue that its significance lies elsewhere: triggering household-level conversations that influence parental driving habits and children’s independent mobility. This people-first model complements infrastructure-led interventions such as safer junction design and traffic calming. The group’s greatest challenge has been institutional access. Education administrators cite academic load and regulatory constraints as reasons for limited engagement. More than two thousand outreach attempts to schools have yielded only sporadic responses, highlighting a systemic reluctance to integrate road safety into mainstream learning. Urban governance specialists warn that without formal recognition, such efforts risk remaining peripheral despite their social value.
Public agencies have taken note. Informal cooperation with traffic authorities and child welfare institutions has lent credibility, though no formal policy framework yet exists to embed road safety education citywide. Officials familiar with mobility planning say that aligning these grassroots programmes with Bengaluru’s climate and liveability goals could strengthen outcomes, particularly as the city seeks to encourage walking and cycling to cut emissions. As Bengaluru continues to invest in sustainable transport and safer streets, the next phase may depend less on technology or enforcement and more on behavioural change rooted in childhood. Embedding Bengaluru road safety into education policy could determine whether future growth leads to healthier, more resilient urban movement or repeats the risks of the past.
