Fleet Forum goes India......

A couple of months ago I was approached by Mike Patrick, Director Safety, Health and Environment. He explained that TNT joined hands with Global Road Safety Partnership (GRSP) and Shell to set up the India Road Safety Partnership (IRSP), a public-private-civil society partnership and he invited Fleet Forum to join as well. The objective of the IRSP is to reduce the number of accidents and incidents and to share best practices. I didn’t have to think long….of course Fleet Forum wants to join!

So in October I travelled to India to (together with Mike and Ken Shaw from GRSP) visit companies and humanitarian organisations to see if they were interested to join. Indian traffic is amazing, I thought that, after working in Kenya that I was sort of an ‘expert’ and that nothing that happened on the roads could surprise or scare me…but I was wrong! Take hundreds of auto-riksjahs, donkeys and cows, an elephant, motorbikes where complete families are riding on (the maximum I saw was 6 people on 1 bike), cars, trucks, buses and pedestrians and you know you are on a highway in India. And everybody seems to think that they are ‘king of the road’ and that they always have the right of way. And everybody is in a hurry, the horn is the most important part of the car, patience is a habit that is quickly forgotten when you see that last free spot on the road.

Luckily the interest from organisations to improve road safety is there, we talked to various organisations and all of them were enthusiastic about the idea and wanted to join. We also visited 2 subcontractors of TNT and conducted a Fleet Safety assessment to see in what areas they could improve on their safety management and we will start to implement together with these subcontractors in Q1 2010. We will also, together with the Confederation of Indian Industries (CII), organise a seminar to launch the IRSP!

To be continued……