Just Spamming | Retired Civil Servants Unite To Prevent Road Accidents
Unable to look the other way when the gory sights of road accidents showed up on Indian roads, as someone who had also lost his close relatives, including a newly married couple, to road mishaps, he studied the system closely
An important public welfare initiative took shape last week in Chennai, thanks to a handful of retired civil servants who have taken up the public safety challenge. Called the ‘Society for the Prevention of Road Accidents’ or SPRA in short, it seeks to address the grave issue that has been thoroughly ignored, allowing the State to earn the dubious distinction of recording the highest number of road accidents in the country that registers an average of 1,50,000 fatal accidents every year with one in 10 deaths happening in Tamil Nadu.
It all started with London educated Ravi Garyali, a banker, entrepreneur and philanthropist all rolled into one, who lived in Chennai. Unable to look the other way when the gory sights of road accidents showed up on Indian roads, as someone who had also lost his close relatives, including a newly married couple, to road mishaps, he studied the system closely. He found that beyond poor infrastructure, the deeper failures were in the weak regulations. The absence of proper training for drivers and riders and the testing methods adopted for issuing driving licenses was found to be a main culprit. So Garyali founded SPRA in 2022. But his untimely death in 2025, which was preceded by a period of illness, put the roadblocks in advancing his dream.
To take forward his ideas, his sister and retired senior IAS officer C K Garyali, stepped in and formed a strong and committed board of trustees, most of them former civil servants, police officers and social workers with impeccable track records. Prominent among those she roped in were Jayanthi, a former bureaucrat, as patron and Archana Ramasundaram who was a distinguished police officer at the national level, as president. Vita Garyali, wife of Ravi Garyali was made the vice president.
She also invited Dipankar Ghose, a well-known environmental activist who popularized responsible adventure tourism by taking common people to the wild in Tamil Nadu, to be the secretary. Garyali knew Ghose when she was the tourism secretary in her younger years and wanted to introduce adventure tourism in the State. Now, to carry forward the wishes of her brother, he relied on Ghose, who started the work on SPRA immediately and arranged for collaborations with various institutions and agencies ahead of the founder’s day celebrations last Friday.
As a prelude to the founder’s day, a free eye camp was conducted for drivers with the sponsorship of private entities, Equitas and CAMS, at the Madhavaram truck terminus. A team of doctors from Sankara Nethralya, armed with sophisticated testing equipment, landed at the venue to conduct an elaborate eye checkup for drivers. Janani, an optometrist who headed the medical team, said that the eyesight of some of the drivers were found to be so impaired that it was not safe for them to drive.
As part of the project, which is a CSR initiative for Equitas, free spectacles would be provided for the drivers, who underwent testing at Madhavaram and those needing surgeries and other treatments would be provided with referrals to the hospital. Earlier, too, eye camps had been conducted by SPRA in association with Sankara Nethralaya for bus drivers from various city bus depots since clear sight was one of the simplest safeguards against accidents in 2025.
SPRA, founded with the conviction that every road user should wake up to the stark realities relating to road safety and become a responsible driver, had decided to come up with a ‘comic strip on road safety’ to emphasize on the need for safe driving, Ghose said. While road safety education would be carried out through modern public campaigns using digital and social media, the comic strip idea was a blast from the past. At the event marking the founder’s day and the revival of SPRA, Ghose circulated a worn out copy of ‘Road Safety Comics’ that was brought out by Burmah Shell. Having procured the comic book during his school days at Don Bosco, he has preserved it for more than six decades.
The copies of the comics that were presented to the dignitaries on the stage, including Chennai Commissioner of Police A Amalrai, at the atrium of Spencer Plaza, the venue for the Founder’s Day event, had old time picture stories. One was on ‘Adventures of Jagdish the Reckless Motorist.’ The medium would be used to tell the modern day stories on misadventures by motorists and others in the modern era, Ghose said. The concern over road safety, elucidated through the over six decade old comic book by Burmah Shell, wass still a contemporary reality in Chennai and Tamil Nadu and SPRA was committed to play its part through awareness and advocacy, Ghose said.
Since public participation alone could bring in the dividends in the project, Ghose has planned to involve a wide range of people, starting with traffic wardens for preventing accidents. To ensure a sense of responsibility among drivers, Ghose would like to collaborate with the driving schools and RTO offices in creating awareness and to work with government authorities to improve road signages and alert drivers with more hazard signals, besides enforcing speed limits on the roads.
Above all, SPRA advocates the idea of focusing on the physical and mental health of commercial drivers with special attention on their vision, providing them frequent training, setting up shelters for them along the highways and shifting of liquor stores and bars away from Highway.
