Manipur Media Sensitization Strengthens Road Safety Partnership

Manipur's Transport Department placed the media at the centre of its road safety strategy on January 10, 2026, organising a dedicated Media Sensitization Programme as part of National Road Safety Month 2026 at the Conference Hall of the Directorate of Information and Public Relations, Nityaipat Chuthek, Imphal. Themed "Strengthening Media Partnership for Safer Roads," the programme brought together senior government officials, traffic police officers, and representatives of both print and electronic media organisations — recognising that the battle for safer roads in Manipur cannot be won by enforcement alone, and that the media's power to shape public attitudes and behaviours is an essential and underutilised resource in the state's road safety ecosystem.

Overview of the Media Sensitization Programme

Placing Journalists at the Heart of Road Safety Governance

The decision to hold a dedicated media sensitization programme as part of National Road Safety Month 2026 reflects a sophisticated understanding of how road safety culture is built and sustained in a democratic society. Enforcement drives change behaviour when officers are present. Infrastructure improvements create safer conditions for all users. But neither enforcement nor infrastructure can shift the underlying attitudes, social norms, and community expectations that determine whether road safety compliance becomes a genuine cultural value — rather than a compliance game played around visible enforcement. That shift requires communication, and communication at the scale needed for a state like Manipur requires the media.

The programme was organised around an interactive session format — not a series of one-way presentations from officials to journalists, but a genuine dialogue in which senior government officials and expert members engaged with media representatives on a range of road safety issues. This format reflected a recognition that journalists who understand road safety deeply — its causes, its consequences, its policy dimensions, and its human stories — are far more effective advocates for safer roads than journalists who have attended a briefing and received a press release.

Khumanthem Diana Devi, IAS, Director of Transport, Manipur, called upon media professionals to play an active and sustained role in promoting road safety — urging journalists and editors to use their platforms to reinforce safe driving practices, responsible road use, and adherence to traffic rules. She emphasised that sustained media involvement is crucial in shaping public behaviour and saving lives — a framing that positions journalists not merely as reporters on road safety events but as active participants in the road safety mission itself.

Theme — Strengthening Media Partnership for Safer Roads

From Coverage to Collaboration

The theme of the programme — Strengthening Media Partnership for Safer Roads — signals an important evolution in how Manipur's Transport Department conceives of the media's role in road safety. A partnership is not a transactional relationship in which government supplies information and media provides coverage. It is a collaborative relationship built on shared purpose, mutual accountability, and a common commitment to a specific outcome — in this case, safer roads and fewer fatalities across Manipur.

Additional Chief Secretary Anurag Bajpai, IFS, who graced the programme as Chief Guest, was direct about the stakes: road safety must be a top priority across the state. He called for stronger media partnership to promote road safety and responsible public behaviour — and urged journalists to go beyond event coverage to actively highlight the specific road safety deficiencies that their reporting uncovers. His call for journalists to highlight shortcomings such as the absence of caution markings near schools and other infrastructure safety gaps is particularly significant — it positions the media not merely as a communication channel for government messages but as an independent accountability mechanism for road safety governance.

This accountability role is essential in a context where road safety infrastructure gaps are frequently invisible to senior policymakers and administrators until they appear in a credible news report. A journalist who visits a school zone and documents the absence of speed humps, the faded state of zebra crossings, or the absence of school zone signage is performing a road safety audit that government inspection schedules may take months to replicate. When that reporting reaches a wider audience and prompts public accountability, it can drive infrastructure improvements faster and more reliably than internal departmental processes alone.

Manipur's Road Safety Crisis — Three Times the National Fatality Rate

A State That Cannot Afford to Treat Road Safety as a Peripheral Concern

The urgency behind Manipur's media sensitization programme is grounded in road safety data that demands the most serious institutional response the state can muster. Additional Chief Secretary Anurag Bajpai stated that the fatality rate in Manipur from road accidents is almost three times the national average — a figure that places the state among the most dangerous road environments in India, and one that makes every road safety initiative — including media engagement — a matter of urgent public health priority.

A fatality rate three times the national average is not merely a statistical anomaly — it reflects specific, identifiable road safety failures that are claiming a disproportionate number of lives relative to Manipur's population and vehicle numbers. The major problems identified at the programme — overloading of vehicles, drunk driving, blank or missing registration plates, wrong-side driving, failure to wear seat belts, mobile phone use while driving, and non-wearing of helmets — are a comprehensive diagnosis of the behavioural failures that are driving Manipur's road safety crisis.

Each of these failures is addressable — not through any single intervention, but through the sustained combination of enforcement, infrastructure improvement, and the kind of deep, persistent public awareness that only media engagement at scale can deliver. A state where the fatality rate is three times the national average needs every available tool in the road safety arsenal — and the media is one of the most powerful and most underutilised tools available.

Key Road Safety Issues Discussed at the Programme

A Comprehensive Agenda From Parking to Public Transport

The interactive session at the media sensitization programme addressed a broad and practically grounded range of road safety issues — reflecting the complexity of Manipur's road safety challenge and the diversity of perspectives represented among the programme's participants.

Discussion topics included the revitalisation of the public transport system — a fundamental infrastructure issue with direct road safety implications. In states where public transport is inadequate, unreliable, or unavailable, citizens default to private two-wheelers for daily mobility — dramatically increasing the exposure of the population to the highest-risk category of road travel. Improving public transport reduces two-wheeler dependency and, with it, the exposure to two-wheeler-specific road fatalities that account for a significant share of Manipur's road deaths.

The construction of multi-level parking areas was discussed as an urban mobility and road safety measure — addressing the congestion, illegal parking, and traffic flow disruption that contribute to accidents in Imphal and other urban centres. Traffic rules and regulations, steps taken by the Transport Department in connection with traffic inconveniences, and other road safety issues were also addressed — providing media representatives with the detailed, contextualised understanding of government road safety action that enables accurate, informed, and impactful reporting.

Three Pillars — Engineering, Enforcement and Education

Manipur's Integrated Road Safety Framework

Anurag Bajpai highlighted that the government is intensifying efforts under three core pillars during National Road Safety Month 2026: Engineering, Enforcement, and Education. This framework — a subset of the national 4Es approach that also includes Emergency Care — provides a structured basis for understanding the diverse range of interventions that Manipur is deploying simultaneously to address its road safety crisis.

Engineering addresses the physical road environment — the road surface conditions, signage, lane markings, school zone infrastructure, pedestrian crossings, and junction design that determine whether roads are structurally safe or structurally dangerous. The media's role in the Engineering pillar is to document infrastructure deficiencies and hold road agencies accountable for addressing them in a timely manner.

Enforcement addresses the behavioural dimension — penalising violations, creating deterrence, and signalling that traffic rules carry real and consistent consequences. The media's role here is to report enforcement actions accurately, communicate the consequences of violations to a broad audience, and investigate patterns of selective or inconsistent enforcement that undermine the rule of law on Manipur's roads.

Education addresses awareness and cultural change — building the knowledge, values, and social norms that sustain road safety compliance beyond enforcement contexts. The media's role in Education is direct, sustained, and potentially transformative — through road safety reporting, human interest stories about accident consequences, expert interviews, and community-focused content that reaches audiences that formal awareness campaigns cannot.

Media as a Force Multiplier for Road Safety Awareness

Journalism That Saves Lives

The conclusion of National Road Safety Month 2026 in Manipur featured a Grand Finale at the City Convention Centre, Imphal, at which Chief Minister Yumnam Khemchand Singh launched the Manipur Heli Service Portal and flagged off two interceptor vehicles for the Transport Department. The Chief Minister announced the government's commitment to repairing neglected roads to enhance road safety — and stressed the importance of organising awareness events across the state. Chief Secretary Dr. Puneet Kumar Goel emphasised the four main stakeholders in preventing road accidents: the Public Works Department, the Transport Department, Traffic Police, and the public — a framing that positions road safety as a shared governance responsibility rather than the exclusive domain of any single department.

A short film on National Road Safety Month 2026, capturing awareness drives, outreach programmes, and citizen participation in traffic safety campaigns across the state, was screened at the Grand Finale — demonstrating the power of visual storytelling for road safety communication and providing a model for the kind of media content that the Transport Department is encouraging journalists to produce and broadcast independently.

The media sensitization programme's enduring significance lies in the relationship it initiated between Manipur's road safety governance apparatus and the journalists who cover it. When that relationship is sustained — when journalists continue to report rigorously on road safety long after National Road Safety Month is over, when editors continue to prioritise road safety stories as genuine public interest journalism, and when senior officials continue to engage transparently with media questions about road safety progress and failures — the programme will have achieved its core purpose. Road safety in Manipur needs the media not once a year during awareness month, but every day, on every platform, in every community across the state.