Over 90 percent youngsters in the country's top five metropolitan cities are concerned about the rising road accidents and air pollution levels in their cities, a survey revealed Wednesday.
Conducted by UL (Underwriters Laboratories), an independent safety science company, the survey covered over a thousand teenagers between the ages of 13-18 years in schools across Mumbai, Delhi, Chennai, Bangalore and Kolkata.
"The top two concerns of students across the five cities are road safety and traffic related pollution, with more than 90 percent of the students in agreement," said the survey.
As commuters who use the roads everyday, their observation was that it takes a long time to cross roads and there was no place to stand at intersections while crossing.
While the youngsters pointed out that over-speeding and drunken driving were the two main reasons for road accidents, they also raised questions about the process of obtaining driving licenses, the poor condition of roads, lack of proper signage and barricading around sites that are dug up for repairs.
On the brighter side, though, over 75 percent of the children said they had been through a safety drill in their schools and at 85 percent, the national capital region and Chennai came out on top in this regard.
Surprisingly, despite the popularity of social media amongst the youth, the youngsters credited television (53 percent), parents (51 percent) and newspapers (51 percent) as the top three sources from where they get safety related information while social media came fourth (43 percent).
