Telangana Launches India's First Child Road Safety Action Plan

Alarmed by the growing number of children losing their lives in road accidents, the Telangana government has launched what is being described as India's first dedicated Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030 — a landmark initiative that represents a fundamental shift in how road safety policy is designed, targeting the most vulnerable and underserved group of road users with a focused, evidence-based action framework. Developed with support from the Public Health Foundation of India's Indian Institute of Public Health and UNICEF, the plan aims to make roads safer for school children and young pedestrians across Telangana through coordinated action across multiple government departments and agencies.

Overview of Telangana's Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030

India's First Dedicated Child Road Safety Framework

The Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030 is not a general road safety initiative with a child safety component — it is a dedicated, child-focused framework that places the specific vulnerabilities, behaviours, and road environments of children and adolescents at the centre of its planning, intervention design, and accountability mechanisms. This distinction is significant. India's road safety governance has historically developed policy primarily around adult road users — particularly drivers and riders — with child safety addressed as a secondary concern through general awareness campaigns and school zone enforcement drives. The Telangana initiative breaks from this pattern by treating child road safety as a distinct policy domain with its own evidence base, priority interventions, and institutional ownership.

The plan is being developed through a consultative process that brings together government departments, technical institutions, international organisations, civil society groups, and community representatives — ensuring that the action framework reflects both the technical expertise of road safety professionals and the ground-level realities of the environments in which children actually move, play, and travel. The initiative has been described by officials and international partners as a potential national model — one that other Indian states could adapt and replicate once Telangana demonstrates its implementation and impact.

The Child Road Safety Crisis — National and State-Level Data

10,000 Children Lost Every Year — A Crisis That Cannot Wait

The urgency behind Telangana's Child Road Safety Action Plan is grounded in data that makes the case for dedicated policy action with devastating clarity. According to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways, nearly 10,000 children lost their lives in road crashes across India in 2023 — a daily toll of approximately 27 children, each of whom had every right to expect that the roads they used would be safe enough to survive.

Road traffic injury is today the leading cause of death of children and adolescents in India — a public health crisis of the first order that receives a fraction of the policy attention directed at other leading causes of child mortality. Every day, nearly 45 children under the age of 18 lose their lives in road crashes in India. In 2022, 16,443 fatalities were reported in this age group, with actual numbers likely to be 20 percent higher due to underreporting. Additionally, around 5 million children suffer non-fatal injuries every year that require hospitalisation — injuries that cause permanent disability, long-term suffering, and enormous economic cost for families and the state alike.

Telangana's own road safety data provides a sobering state-level context. The state recorded 7,281 road accident deaths in 2024, with hundreds of children among the victims — a toll that has directly motivated the state government's decision to move beyond general road safety programming and invest in a child-specific action plan that can address the specific circumstances, vulnerabilities, and intervention needs of child road users across Telangana's diverse urban and rural environments.

State-Level Consultation in Hyderabad

Building the Plan From the Ground Up Through Multi-Stakeholder Dialogue

The first state-level consultation on the Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030 was held in Hyderabad under the leadership of Transport Commissioner K. Ilambarithi — a senior official whose direct involvement signals the Transport Department's institutional ownership of and commitment to the initiative. The consultation was jointly organised by the Public Health Foundation of India's Indian Institute of Public Health and UNICEF, bringing international technical expertise and development experience to the planning process.

The breadth of participation at the consultation meeting reflected the multi-departmental character of the action plan.

Officials from the Transport Department, Education Department, Health Department, Home Department, and Urban Development were joined by representatives from HMDA, GHMC, NHAI, educational institutions, and social organisations — creating a genuinely cross-sectoral forum that acknowledged the reality that child road safety cannot be improved by any single government department acting alone.

This multi-stakeholder consultation approach is particularly important for child road safety planning because children's exposure to road risk spans a range of environments and contexts — school journeys, neighbourhood play, recreational movement, and family travel — each of which falls under the jurisdiction of different government bodies. Coordinating the policies, infrastructure investments, enforcement actions, and awareness programmes of multiple departments around a shared child road safety framework is the central governance challenge that the Action Plan 2030 is designed to address.

Key Focus Areas of the Road Safety Action Plan 2030

Safer School Zones, Pedestrian Infrastructure and Strict Enforcement

Officials and experts participating in the Hyderabad consultation identified several interconnected focus areas that will shape the priorities and interventions of Telangana's Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030.

Safer school zones represent the highest-priority infrastructure focus — addressing the daily, predictable, and extremely high-risk road environment that children navigate during school arrival and dispersal. School zones in India are frequently characterised by the complete absence of the infrastructure that makes them safe: speed humps to slow approaching traffic, clearly marked pedestrian crossings, drop-off zones that prevent chaotic roadside parking, adequate footpaths on approach roads, and school zone signage that alerts drivers to the presence of children. The Action Plan 2030 will establish standards and implementation requirements for school zone safety infrastructure across Telangana's educational institutions.

Pedestrian-friendly roads address the broader challenge of child road safety beyond the immediate school zone — creating footpaths, safe crossings, lighting, and traffic calming measures that protect children as pedestrians throughout the routes they use for daily movement. This infrastructure dimension acknowledges that children's road safety vulnerability is not confined to the school gate but extends to every journey they make on foot through their communities.

Stricter traffic enforcement near educational institutions addresses the behavioural dimension of child road safety — targeting the speeding, parking violations, and dangerous driving near schools that create the conditions in which children are most frequently injured and killed. Sustained, visible enforcement during school hours creates a compliance culture in the most critical locations at the most critical times.

Multi-Department and Multi-Agency Collaboration

Coordination That Matches the Complexity of the Challenge

M Vishnu Vardhan Rao, Executive Vice Chancellor of the Public Health Foundation of India's Indian Institute of Public Health, articulated the governance imperative behind Telangana's approach: reducing child road fatalities requires coordinated efforts among multiple departments and agencies. This coordination requirement is not merely an administrative aspiration — it is a technical necessity that follows directly from the nature of the child road safety challenge.

School zone safety requires the Education Department to establish institutional protocols and the Urban Development Department to invest in infrastructure. Pedestrian infrastructure requires the Public Works Department to build footpaths and the Traffic Police to enforce pedestrian right-of-way. Emergency response for child road accident victims requires the Health Department to ensure trauma care readiness and the Transport Department to support first responder training. Child road safety education requires the Education Department to integrate it into curricula and the Transport Department to provide training resources and materials.

No single department can deliver all of these interventions — and without a coordinating framework that aligns departmental plans, budgets, and accountability mechanisms around shared child road safety outcomes, each department's individual efforts will be less effective than their combined potential. The Action Plan 2030 provides exactly this coordinating framework — creating a shared accountability structure that ensures the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.

Telangana is also building on a substantial existing foundation of child road safety infrastructure. The state has launched Traffic Awareness Parks for children, with a plan to establish at least one park in every district by 2026, and has already formed 57 Road Safety Clubs in schools, colleges, and universities to promote responsible road behaviour among young citizens. The Action Plan 2030 builds on these existing initiatives, integrating them within a more comprehensive and strategically coherent child road safety framework.

Telangana's Vision as a National Model for Child Road Safety

Every Child Deserves Safe Mobility — A Standard India Can Set

Jelalem B Taffesse, Chief of the UNICEF Andhra Pradesh, Karnataka, and Telangana Field Office, expressed confidence in Telangana's potential to become a national example in implementing child-focused road safety systems — a vision grounded not merely in aspiration but in the state's demonstrated willingness to invest in innovative, evidence-based road safety programming. Every child, she emphasised, deserves safe mobility — a principle that should be as foundational to urban and transport planning as connectivity, capacity, and economic efficiency.

The state government's hope that the initiative will help Telangana emerge as a national example in child road safety planning and accident prevention reflects an understanding that the Action Plan 2030's significance extends beyond Telangana's borders. India does not currently have a national child road safety action plan — a gap that is particularly striking given the scale of the crisis and the evidence that targeted, child-specific interventions are among the most cost-effective road safety investments available. If Telangana's initiative demonstrates measurable reductions in child road fatalities and serves as a replicable model for other states, its impact on India's national road safety outcomes could be transformative.

The Child Road Safety Action Plan 2030 is a beginning — a policy commitment backed by evidence, resourced through multi-departmental collaboration, and motivated by the inescapable moral urgency of a crisis that is claiming 27 children's lives every day across India. Telangana has chosen to act. The question for the rest of India is when it will follow.