Bengaluru: You rush your child to the school-bus, get her in, wave a good-bye and watch the vehicle till it disappears into the traffic. The bus usually has a couple of teachers in it and an assistant. You assure yourself that it will all be fine, and get on with your day. After all, haven’t you paid in excess of a lakh in school fees?
The residents of Bengaluru were in for a surprise when the Bengaluru city police gave the city’s residents over 2,000 reasons why it can’t be ‘all that fine.’
School vans and buses were often seen driven rashly in the city and a police campaign on school vehicles unearthed an unseemly truth.
“We first thought these drivers were in a hurry to reach their schools. That’s why they drove so haphazardly. But then we realised there was something wrong about this pattern. Then we found one driver who was drunk. So we sent a message to all officers to specially check schools vans. So far we are getting one or two cases everyday,” said Additional Commissioner (Traffic) R Hitendra.
It is seven thirty in the morning. Not really a time to drink. But after eight drunken driving cases in four days, the traffic police have decided to send out protocols to schools.
In all cases, the drivers admitted drinking the previous night, but the alcohol was still detected in their system – something that could have led to the drivers being disoriented. In one case, a driver drove directly into a road median, damaging his own bus.
Some of the buses were from top schools – including the Jain Heritage School, Narayana e-techno School, and even a Kendriya Vidyalaya.
The other cause for worry was that over 2,000 other offences - like rash driving, driving wrong way on a one-way lane, jumping signals, carrying excess children – were also observed.
The traffic police are now asking schools to invest in alcoholmeters, so that drivers can be checked soon after logging in everyday.
“They don’t cost much. Instead of the traffic police doing this, if an alcohol check is made mandatory, we believe drivers won’t come in drunk for morning duties. Otherwise, it is a cause for alarm for us and for parents; these are drivers taking small kids and school children,” said R Hitendra.
Schools, on their part, are visibly disturbed. Many depend on outsourced transport arrangements. Many do police verifications for their staff; they have GPS tracking systems for their vehicles, CCTVs, speed governors and all. After last year’s spate of sexual abuse cases, many schools have put in systems to keep tabs on their vehicles.
“This driver had been appointed three days back, we were processing his police verification. Fortunately, nothing happened to the children. He had dropped them off and was on his way back, when he apparently had stopped for a drink and crashed the bus. He was sacked immediately,” said Ramani N Valluri, Principal of Narayana e-Techno’s Yelahanka branch, whose bus met with an accident.
The school was quick to defend itself, claiming it followed all protocols and such cases will be dealt with an iron hand. But it could well have been a tragic story if the children were still in the bus when the accident happened. And a story that could have happened anywhere else in the country.
“More than being the head of an institution, I’m a parent myself so I understand the concern of parents. We fired that errant driver the same day,” said Archana Vishwanath, principal of the Jain Heritage School, another school whose driver was hauled up. “Our fleet is outsourced, but our counsellors hold training sessions for the drivers. We hold sensitisation workshops with the help of police on the hazards of drinking. We constantly remind them: you have children too, would you want your child to go in a bus driven rashly?” said Ms Valluri.
Some schools even ask the older children to keep an eye on driver behaviour, and report to them. But this kind of spying doesn’t help if all the children in the afternoon buses are in the kinder-garten.
So how is it that despite the constant monitoring, such cases slip through? Eternal vigil, as they say, is the only answer.
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