“If India has to change, focus on kids”: Honda Road Safety Push
- In a conversation with Vinay Dhingra, the Honda India Foundation details its work across education, healthcare, skilling and road safety.
A child refusing to ride unless a parent fastens a seatbelt is one of many small actions Honda India Foundation (HIF) hopes will add up. The foundation treats classroom lessons as a starting point for wider behaviour change. The idea is that children take safety messages home, nudge family habits, and slowly alter community norms.
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Grab Offer Now In conversation with HT Auto, Vinay Dhingra, Senior Director of HMSI and Trustee at HIF, said, “If India has to change, then the biggest focus should be on the kids," arguing that early education can create the social pressure necessary to make safety routines habitual.
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“When they go back home and tell their parents, Papa, I will not sit if you don’t wear a seatbelt." That single line from Vinay Dhingra is more than an anecdote. It’s the organising principle behind Honda India Foundation’s approach to CSR. In practice, this means pairing classroom lessons with practical experiences, factory tours, road-safety workshops and community outreach. This ensures messages taught in school are reinforced at multiple touchpoints.
How it began
Honda India Foundation was set up in 2018 as the CSR arm of Honda Group companies operating in India, bringing their social initiatives under a single umbrella. Since then, it has focused on five core areas: road safety, education, healthcare, environment and rural development, aligning its programmes with both local
community needs and national development priorities.
Road safety
Road safety initiatives predate the foundation itself and have been part of Honda’s India operations for roughly 25 years. Dhingra is blunt about the obstacle: much of the problem is mindset, not information. “People in India normally say, ‘I know everything’. They don’t wear helmets because they feel God will save them. So how do you change that mindset?"
The foundation pursues several avenues at once: traffic education parks, school outreach, teacher conventions, story-based videos and a digital library. It also pilots practical measures, driving practice zones to train learners off public roads, mobile LED vans for village outreach, and partnerships with transport unions to improve truck visibility and maintenance.
“One of the very big reasons for accidents in India is rear-end hits," Dhingra observes. “Trucks are parked on the roadside, lights are not working. We started working on that."
Education as the entry point
Honda Ki Paathshala was also set up during the pandemic, after the foundation noticed many children from low-income families falling behind.
“A lot of poor people were not able to have online facilities… After Class five or six, studies become more difficult. English, math, science, they can't tutor themselves, and they can't afford teachers. A better option is to drop out," Dhingra explains.
The programme focuses on core subjects and early STEM exposure in small classes. “Currently, we have 106 centres spanning India — all states," he says. “Every centre has around 24 students, and the results have become better." The foundation plans to add vocational and higher-secondary coaching for students advancing through the system. Students also take part in factory visits and road-safety modules designed to translate classroom lessons into everyday decisions. He calls children challenging adult habits at home “back pressure," something he believes traditional awareness campaigns rarely achieve. He cites parent feedback as evidence that these small household changes do occur.
From a COVID response to a neighbourhood hub
The foundation’s story started at a converted CKD packing facility in Manesar. HIF changed the space to act as a temporary COVID care centre at the government’s request. After the pandemic ended, the facility continued to function as a small hospital for the locals.
“Our thought became stronger, why don't we continue not as a COVID, but as a healthcare centre," Dhingra recalls. “So we converted this to a small hospital. The daycare has around 60 beds available, and gradually this became almost a mini hospital with diagnostic facilities, X-rays and blood samples."
The centre now combines basic healthcare with skilling and wellness programmes. It also runs a pharmacy distributing medicines to patients at discounted rates. The centre has become a local hub intended to address immediate medical needs while linking people to longer-term opportunities.
Skills with placement in mind
Skilling is tied closely to job outcomes. “One of the very big requirements of India currently is employment creation," Dhingra remarks. The foundation focuses on courses with clear demand, health support roles, retail and warehousing, tailoring and beauty services, EV repair, and solar-sector jobs.
“We started organising courses where a hundred per cent placement can be done," he says. About 3,700 people are trained each year, and the General Duty Assistant programme alone runs in roughly 80 centres. Dhingra stresses that selected courses are intended to lead directly to work rather than act as one-off training.
Environment, agriculture and low-cost innovation
Beyond education, safety and skilling, the foundation runs water restoration, rainwater harvesting and other environmental projects. It is piloting a construction-and-demolition waste programme aimed at turning debris into tiles, and is supporting startups that propose low-cost road-safety solutions, an initiative that drew around 150 applications and will provide seed funding and incubation to selected teams.
The foundation is also working on farmer support through centres of excellence, intended to help producer organisations access government schemes and improve yields.
What the numbers show
Quantifying behaviour change is complex, but the foundation’s published figures show the scale of its outreach. From April 2025 to date, the foundation reports over 51.81 lakh beneficiaries across programmes. Road and traffic safety accounts for the largest share at over 40.24 lakh people, followed by environment, healthcare, rural development and education.
Cumulatively, the foundation has reported 1.41 crore beneficiaries up to March 2025; with the latest period added, the total stands at 1.93 crore.
Dhingra acknowledges limits. “There is still a huge gap between international standards and India," he says. He argues that sustained change requires enforcement to follow awareness: “If awareness and enforcement match, then people realise government is watching and I have to change. That helps habit formation much faster."
The foundation’s approach is pragmatic: nudge behaviours at the household level, pilot practical fixes, and work with institutions where possible. That mix is unlikely to transform road safety overnight, and Dhingra does not present it as a substitute for infrastructure investment or stronger enforcement. But he frames the strategy as complementary. “We can’t wait for infrastructure to become perfect before saving lives," he says. “If mindset improves, a lot of lives can be saved even before roads improve."
For now, the emphasis remains on small, observable changes: a child insisting on a seatbelt, a trainee finding steady work, a safer stretch of road that can be scaled if outcomes hold up under measurement and partnership.
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