BENGALURU: Anyone who braves the misfortune of traversing Bengaluru on its roads would be all too familiar that their problems extend beyond mere inconvenience, and well into the territory of mortal hazard. While the city’s residents await infrastructural improvement, enabling oneself to recognise road safety as a crucial and life-saving value system becomes the need of the hour. When 14-year-old Surya Uthkarsha met with a significant road accident at just 6 years of age, it made him recognise the gravitas of road safety in India, which is only increased exponentially by the lacuna of knowledge and civic sense in the country. Six years later, when he was around 12, the Bengaluru-based boy found The Marg Initiative: a volunteer-based organisation that teaches road safety to children in India, including those in Bengaluru.
“When I was 6 years old, I was the victim of a road accident on a highway near Shivamogga; that's when I realised that there’s not enough awareness or infrastructure for road safety in India. So then I came in touch with a few other victims of other accidents, and got inspired to start The Marg Initiative,” says Uthkarsha, adding his gratitude towards the recognition received from the United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF) India and the Bengaluru Traffic Police (BTP).
The Marg Initiative is an entirely volunteer-run organisation, with around 20 volunteers – all of whom are students – comprising the team as of now. Two of them are based in the United States of America, where, as Uthkarsha mentions, there is not a pressing need to advocate about road safety given the infrastructure in place. Currently, Bengaluru houses eight volunteers, followed by Delhi with seven and Surat with four.
The organisation primarily tries to fill the lacuna left by the mainstream education system that undervalues the importance of including road safety in school curricula. Its volunteers go to schools and orphanages, trying to educate the kids present there, and it’s often the latter site that is more supportive. “I think as much as parents push their kids out in the world to be independent, they kind of fall back when it comes to teaching road safety. And I think the kids are pretty open-minded, and they would be open to learning; but there's no one to teach it to them. It’s not very easy to convince schools, that are a bit sceptical, to let us host sessions, compared to orphanages, because orphanages tend to usually want to imbibe as much as knowledge as possible, which all the teachers may not be able to provide. We have sent out more than 2,000 emails to various schools across India, and the response rate has been very slim,” rues Uthkarsha.
In the two-and-a-half years since the inception of The Marg Initiative, despite gestures of recognition as aforementioned, it has been hard for the venture to garner institutional backing and traction. An undeterred Uthkarsha, who tries to make the best of the hand he has been dealt, says, “I think one thing that really helped me was using my age as a leverage to get more opportunities. If I cold-call or cold-email someone and start with my age, then they are more intrigued; they are curious about what this kid’s building, right? It has taken months of cold-emailing [to garner attention to the cause]; persistence would be one word to sum it up, because it is not very easy to get into the mainstream institutions of law and bureaucracy because they have strict boundaries in what they can and what they cannot do.”
Volunteers of The Marg Initiative, despite the challenges, refuse to let their backs against the proverbial wall. Uthkarsha knows all too well that with its few volunteers, the organisation can hardly be omnipresent in the obvious sense. He believes however, that the organisation’s core role is to be a “catalyst” that raises conversations. Once these conversations have been raised in India’s households, and when parents have paid them their due heed, The Marg Initiative’s purpose will have been fulfilled.