New Delhi, Sep 28 (IANS) Social networking sites Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and even blogs will be made use of by the Indian government to spread the message of safe driving, transport officials said Monday.
“For generating mass awareness about road safety, apart from using traditional media tools, modern web-based social networking tools will be used to spread knowledge of road safety,” K.K. Kapila, vice chairman of the International Road Federation (IRF), said in a statement.

“We have developed videos on safe driving and other aspects of road safety. We plan to put them up on YouTube to cater to the growing number of people whose first choice to find information is to go online,” Kapila added.

India’s road transport and highways ministry and IRF last week launched a national campaign to reduce road accidents by 50 percent by 2012.

“Road safety is a community effort. We will seek additional ideas on tackling areas like aggressive driving, drug-driving as well as continuing to look for new approaches to saving lives by targeting speed and young drivers,” Kapila said.

The ministry says over 100,000 people are killed in road accidents in India every year. On an average, 313 persons die every day on Indian roads — and this number is on the rise.

India accounts for nearly 10 percent of 1.3 million road accident deaths worldwide each year.