Students’ safety: MVD, police to put in place stringent norms for drivers

A Motor Vehicles department official checking the fitness of a school bus in Kozhikode in this file photo.

To enhance the safety of students travelling in educational institution buses, the Motor Vehicles department (MVD) and the police have decided to put in place stringent norms for school bus drivers in Kozhikode. Only those who complete the one-day training programme of the MVD on safe driving, which was officially launched here on Wednesday, will be permitted to drive educational institution vehicles from the next academic year.

Drivers who undergo training will be issued a certificate, which has to be shown to enforcement squads during flash vehicle checks as part of heightened safety measures. Training will be given after verification of the licence. Police clearance certificates will also be made mandatory in case the drivers have a history of involvement in traffic rule violations.

According to MVD officials, the fitness check of educational institution vehicles, a mandatory exercise carried out every year, will be completed by the end of May. Automated facilities will also be used to complete the process. By August, CCTV cameras will also be made mandatory for all educational institution vehicles, they said.

Traffic police officials said the fitness check was expected to cover over 1,000 school buses in Kozhikode city alone. They made it clear that safety norms would be equally applicable to drivers working for private coaching centres. For vehicles other than school buses, the stickers issued after police checking will be mandatory to operate pick-and-drop services. Mobile enforcement squads of the police and the MVD will jointly conduct checking to expose safety rule violations, they affirmed.

Meanwhile, the proposal to enable the GPS tracking system in school buses is still hanging in the balance due to the alleged lack of cooperation on the part of various school managements. Now, the GPS system is functional only in very few private institution buses in Kozhikode. The MVD’s Vidhya Vahan mobile application designed for the purpose also remain underutilised.

Similarly, the launch of radio frequency identification and detection (RFID) cards for students, which was planned several years ago to track the entry and exit of students in school buses, has also not been implemented. Sources in the MVD and the police said technical issues related to the setting up of an exclusive server continued to be a major hurdle to its implementation.