Despite being the most crucial part of our life, road safety management is still an ignored field. One of the largest consumers of two wheelers and cars, India struggles for trained manpower for road traffic management. There were 1,51,417 deaths in over 4,67,044 road accidents in 2018, with as many as 11% deaths due to road accidents.
Sensing the crisis in this field, Institute of Road Traffic Education (IRTE), Faridabad, started a master’s programme in Traffic Management in 2018.
The two-year MSc Traffic Management programme affiliated by Maharshi Dayanand University (MDU), Rohtak, is aimed to create academically trained manpower and research-based training towards capacity building in road safety management for India.
Trained and specialised workforce is the need of the hour to bring down the number of road accidents in the country to fulfil India’s commitment to the United Nation’s goal set under the UN Decade of Action of drastically reducing road accidents by the year 2030.
Programme details
Candidates enrolled with the programme are taught road safety audits, traffic management, general risk management, motor vehicle legislations and its enforcement, road crash investigation, human psychology and safe system approach etc as part of the course curriculum.
Low enrolments
Lack of awareness about the programme and career prospects in this filed has led to lukewarm response in the first two years since the start of the programme. For the first two batches, the Institute received just four and five enrolments respectively against 30 sanctioned seats for the course.
Lacunae at educational level
There is an acute scarcity of institutions imparting traffic management education. Highlighting the need to strengthen the overall education system of traffic management, the gap will only be filled by setting up new institutions to offer courses in this field. Currently, civil engineers, police department officials and others are mostly responsible for managing traffic-related issues in India.