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| Subir Roy: Children of good people, good schools | | Now that the need to reduce carbon footprints is nationally recognised, all children must come to school by bus |
| Subir Roy / New Delhi Mar 13, 2010, 00:07 IST |
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It is still early days but a strong contender for the most uninformed and backward-looking statement of the year comes from the principal of one of the most prominent schools in Kolkata. The lady has a unique solution to the problem of traffic jams in front of such schools. She told a leading paper that allowing cars within schools to drop children creates “security” problems. So, “flyovers alone can solve the traffic congestion in front of prominent schools”.
What an unnamed traffic police sergeant has to say is revealing. “Whenever we have tried to be strict,” he laments, “our men have been shunted out by our seniors.” The reason is simple, “pool car associations” and “school authorities” have a “good understanding” with “our senior officers”.
The problem is neither new nor unique to the city. The good schools, where good people send their children, have been around for long, and are usually located in the heart of towns, built when cities were uncongested and cars were few. Today, more children per school and exponential growth in traffic create traffic jams in front of these schools.
The city where this problem is the least endemic is Delhi — for two reasons. It has more road space than most cities and, what is vital, many schools have for long gone in for an institutional solution. Delhi Transport Corporation buses are contracted out to schools to ferry their children, thus reducing to a minimum the number of vehicles in front of a school jostling for space and blocking traffic. Some still send their children by car, but bus-using children far outnumber those using cars and so the problem is minimised.
Mumbai, which is also a congested and old city like Kolkata, has in the past tried to solve the problem in its distinctive civic sense-driven way. Long ago, one of its venerable institutions, Cathedral School, had absolutely forbidden parents from sending children to school by car and an elaborate bus system had been put in place. Then a model school bus system was tried out about a decade ago in which software was used to ensure that students took the shortest possible route to school. Several schools tried it out and a few more will do so soon.
But the city similar to Kolkata in the unwillingness of its good people who send their children to good schools to change is Bangalore. Afflicted by the same kind of traffic jams, the police, a few years ago, banned cars from dropping children right in front of schools. They had to either organise the bus system — state-owned BMTC was ready to play the role of DTC — or allow permit-holding pool cars to drop children within the schools. This was feasible as most of them sat on extended campuses.
Initial parental reaction was of outrage, some even went to court, mercifully the courts decided to give the system a try and it got going. But over time, nothing seems to have changed. The traffic jams, cars bringing children in singles if not groups, still clog the streets before the schools. Some schools use some buses but it is still a car ride for too many children.
Now that concern for global warming is mainstream, and the need to reduce carbon footprints nationally recognised, there is only one set of solutions to the traffic-jam-before-schools problem: All children have to come to school by bus. Where a good public bus system exists, its help can be taken. Where it does not, schools should pool their buses and devise a shared system whereby different school children from an area use buses plying along different routes touching schools on the way. So, a child boards a bus that touches her particular school. If computer-shy Kolkata denizens with a Left hangover can’t figure out how to do this, they can ask any number of software firms in Bangalore to devise an application which can optimally structure routes connecting neighbourhoods to schools, using a pool of school buses.
Another solution, part of the package, has to be devised by the authorities — staggering school and office timings so that all school and office journeys do not have to be made at the same time. If these solutions are implemented together, then the jams-before-schools will be severely curtailed.
If this is not rocket science, why has it not happened yet? Good people who send their children to good schools rather dislike public transport, even though the experience with DTC has proved perfectly safe. The model bus system in Mumbai is being regulated after some accidents. This should make it safer; and cars meet with accidents too. The Kolkata middle class finds it respectable to travel by bus, unlike its counterpart in Delhi. But still.
The authorities, as the traffic sergeant’s words admirably bring out, have not acted because they are part of the good people who send their children to good schools. You can hardly take a school to task if you have moved heaven and earth to put your child in that school in the first place.
As for the schools, they are also run by the good people who form the constituency for good schools, sharing the same habits of thought. Also, as the principal’s words quoted above show, they are often tragically out of date, uninformed and ingenious in raising “security” issues. Global warming, or the fact that flyovers don’t help — they simply transfer traffic jams to their two ends — have passed them by. Sure, flyovers are built with public money, but aren’t prominent schools a part of the public? Only a bit more equal than others.
subir.roy@bsmail.in
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