In my role as the CEO of one of India’s largest building materials groups with a multi-location presence across the country, I end up spending a lot of time on the road. While travelling by air saves time, road travel offers something more. A feeling that cannot be measured easily- a front-row view of life. If you enjoy a cup of tea at a highway Dhaba as much as I do, you already know what I am talking about. The casual chats with fellow travellers at stopovers can be very instructive about life in general too.

But then there is also a darker side to India’s uniquely fascinating highways. The sight of mangled beyond-recognition vehicles that are spread across our highways can be a poignant tale to say the least. Each of these under-carriages exposed to the elements tells a sad story of families that have lost their loved ones, of children growing up without a parent and of dreams and hopes that have been shattered.

More than 150,000 lives were lost in India due to road accidents in 2019 or around 18 lives lost every hour, each day of the year! Add to this a further half a million cases of injuries due to accidents, we already know we have a serious road safety problem in India. We have two clear choices here – ignore them to avoid all the heartache or do something about it.

In 2017, our two companies Ambuja Cements and ACC joined hands to improve road safety by focusing our efforts on the 35,000 drivers who are part of our logistics ecosystem. While none of these drivers is directly employed by either company, their behaviour on the roads, driving skills, and ultimately their safety is certainly paramount for us. A five-year road safety campaign was put in place that was followed by the setting up of Driver Management Centres across the country backed by real-time data support from our Transport Analytics Centre (TAC) in Mumbai.

By installing in-vehicle monitoring system (iVMS) devices in over 21,000 vehicles, we were able to get invaluable insights into the driving patterns that had the potential to cause accidents. Based on the data collected on harsh acceleration and braking, hard cornering, over-speeding, erratic driving the logistics team is now able to isolate drivers who are habitual offenders who needed interventions in the form of special training and counselling to avoid accidents. Once pulled up for breaking safety guidelines, drivers will not be allowed to work for Ambuja Cements or ACC without being retrained.

The results of these efforts were quite encouraging.

Between 2018 and 2020, offsite incidents and injuries were halved. While the punitive ‘stick’ approach helped, we also knew that something more had to be done to encourage drivers to make road safety their second nature. The ‘carrot’ came in the form of Vidyasarathi, an education support programme run by ACC Trust since 2017 for communities living around our factories across the country.

In November 2020, in the midst of the Covid-19 pandemic, we got to know that the trucking community was hit hard by the sudden contraction of business. That is when we decided to combine the Vidyasarathi programme with our road-safety campaign. Weofferedtosponsorupto80%ofthetuition fees for drivers’ children’s higher education if they followed the safety protocols consistently. The pilot phase of the programmesaw51drivers’childrenbenefiting from Vidyasarathi. We are expecting to cover as many as 3 to 5 lakh beneficiaries in the coming years.

As a group, we do around 300 million kms a yearandourplanistocover80%ofthisunder the combined road safety and Vidyasarathi

programme that will effectively benefit as many as 10,000 drivers across India. We have very little doubt over the success of this programme because children who are keen to pursue higher education are now telling their parents (drivers) to follow our safety standards in letter and spirit. Further, since these drivers are self-employed truckers their newfound love for safety is benefitting the rest of the industry too.

There is no dearth of resources in India to run CSR programmes. The real challenge is to find new ways and means to make them more impactful. The synergy we are creating by combining two programmes with an over-lapping set of beneficiaries might just be the magic formula we are all seeking. I cannot wait to convert more of my air miles to road miles. I think it is going to be a lot safer too.