Early in morning, or at mid-afternoon, images of worn out, noisy and overloaded vans of ancient makes and models, carrying school children with perspiring faces, are most tormenting.
In the sizzling summers, these over loaded vehicles can be spotted, whizzing through on Karachi’s streets. Many city areas, where schools have mushroomed without any foresight, become completely clogged during the morning and afternoon timings. Bottlenecks are a usual sight along Shahrah-e-Faisal; Embankment Road in Lyari/Kharadar and the main streets of Nazimabad. Some of these neighbourhoods become inaccessible as a result of the haywire movements of school vans, buses, coaches, horse drawn carriages (Victoria carts) and even taxis. In the recent past, school vans have become an essential mode of transport for pupils due to spread out locations of the schools. Whereas the affluent drop their children in flashy automobiles, a sizable number of lower middle and middle income households have to rely on this option for facilitating the education of their children. However, their operations and performance is anything but satisfactory.
Several actors are vital in providing school transport service, foremost among them are the transport contractors. They exist in different scales, ranks and profiles. Discussions with the school transport contractors revealed many factors. Normally the private schools have been found to enrol the students from scattered and far away locations, obviously for commercial benefits. For instance, it is common place for schools in Clifton to draw intake from North Nazimabad or Gulshan-e-Iqbal. Similarly old and well established schools along M.A. Jinnah Road register students from a radius of 10 kilometres and even beyond. The transporters have to juggle around route organization to make the service efficient. As a norm, children who reside far away from the school have to suffer intensely. They are picked up earliest in the morning and dropped in the last.
Prices of fuel have risen exponentially during the past few years. During the previous regimes, diesel prices were not affected, as it was consumed for public transportation of various kinds. There is no relief at present. In many cases the whole service becomes loss oriented as the bus fee is not raised before the academic session. However, some transporters were found to use LPG (low pressure gas) cylinders that have leaking connections. While the use of LPG in vehicles is officially prohibited, it becomes critically hazardous for children who are forced to inhale it without respite. Such cylinders are prone to explosion and fire due to lack of any kind of safety installations. Then there are the poor condition of the roads. These adversely affect the shock absorbers and seating in the vehicles. Obviously, after such exhaustive journeys, the children are completely exhausted.
Transporters also complain about the routine fleecing from the policemen. According to them, the system of extortion has now become a meticulously organized enterprise. A recognizable “token” is handed over to the police staff that intercepts the vehicle for the first time. When the negotiated payment is handed over by the driver, the “token” is shown to any other police cop whosoever may stop the vehicle again. On examining the piece of paper and the clandestine code that it represents, the vehicle is allowed to pass unobstructed. In case of argument by the driver, the challans of very high amounts are issued to the erring driver. Since the drivers have to meet the school timings, they do not usually engage into debates and attempt to settle the matter amicably. Under contractual arrangements, where the school management hires the bus contractors, the ordeal for transporters is severe.
The management fleeces the parents by charging high fees but seldom share any portion of it with transporters. In some cases, management also charges registration fee from the transporters on a unit vehicle basis. As these unprecedented expenses reduce the profit margins, the transporters seldom bother to invest in the repair and maintenance of their fleet. At times, these vehicles are found injecting tonnes of black exhausts due to run down engines and poor quality lubricants. Maintenance and repair is only done on a fire-fighting basis. School buses, with very few exceptions, are very old. Due to the unavailability of access to credit from formal banking channels, the transporters cannot obtain funds to replenish their fleet. It leads to poor quality of services.
Parents of school going children are another important category of stakeholders. Keeping within their means of affordability, they yearn to enrol their children in the best possible institution, irrespective of its location. At times, this results in a high expenditure on the bus fees and undesired fatigue for children. A mother of four school children reported a monthly expenditure of Rs6000/- for school bus fee which was obviously a big drag on the household income. At the conclusion of school hours, the boarding of school bus is a dangerous scene in many cases. The children flock out onto the main road in a rush to get on the buses. In many cases, these buses are parked along busy streets. School managements also remain callous without attempting to facilitate this critical stage.
Most of the school buses operate without a helper/cleaner to control the entry and exit point of the bus. At times, the older children can be seen performing this chore to facilitate the junior folks. Children can be seen balancing their heavy school bags while boarding or getting down from the school buses. These practices are a prelude to accidents.
Resulting fatigue after a school journey is a common observation. Children lose the ability to concentrate on their work due to an ever increasing travel time and stress. The parents are also wary of the indecent and objectionable behaviour of drivers and their colleagues, especially towards young children and girls.
School management is a key player in this scenario. However, they happen to be unconcerned about the problems of school transport. Upon questioning, many of them referred this service as outside the ambit of their responsibilities. Few schools did take the initiative of pre-qualifying the transport contractors and assessing the quality of their fleets. The number of such instances was very limited. Common argument was that since the school had no commercial interest in this whole enterprise, they did not bother to exercise control on the routine working of school transport system. Traffic police officials, sounding articulate, threw the entire blame on transporters. They accused the transporters on several counts. Under-qualified drivers lacking basic skills and driving license; declining fitness of the vehicles; overloading; incomplete documents of the vehicle and overspeeding were few common observations cited by traffic police personnel. Some of these shortcomings were a routine cause of accidents.
Analysis of this situation highlights many issues. The trend of enrolling students from far away neighbourhoods is a basic cause of school transport problems. Private schools operate as an enterprise without any effective regulatory mechanism to check their performance. Therefore the schools are comfortable in seeking pupils from any corner of the city. No school based zoning of any kind is put in place leading to unending problems for the parents and children. Absence of purpose-built schools, evolution and spread of franchise like school chains and lack of effective enforcement of building by-laws are other reasons in this respect. Overall transportation problems further cause hindrance in the movement of school buses. While the morning movement of school vehicles is somewhat detached from the routine traffic hazards, the afternoon flow is affected directly by the high volume of traffic, especially along main streets and intersections. The undefined nature of relationship between school management and transporters also dilute the monitoring of transport operators.
The transporters take full advantage of the situation by extending sub-standard service to an almost captive clientele. Traffic police appears to be largely ineffective in checking the excesses of school transporters.
To improve the situation, drastic steps are needed.
One, the rationalization of school enrolment has to be encouraged according to locality/neighbourhood basis. If opportunities of quality education provision are provided along all the spread out localities, the tendency to send the children to far away places shall decline. It must be understood that this change can occur through incentives only — no law or regulation can force people to seek admission among faraway places. Private sector school operators can be encouraged through incentives and subsidies to open quality learning institutions in lower middle and middle income areas.
Two, the school transport sector must be regulated after a fair assessment of their problems. The school transporters should be provided with access to formal credit for upscaling and improving their fleet of buses. Some kind of assistance may also be extended to rationalize their operational costs. And three, a monitoring mechanism is utmost vital to be instituted in order to check the performance of transporters. This mechanism may be formalized on the pattern of Citizens Police Liaison Committee. The latest technologies may be used to undertake this task. Vehicle monitoring devices that are common place in tracking the movement of automobiles, may be installed in school buses to observe their movement. Traffic police, school managements and representatives of the parents may be invited to create this institutional arrangement. After all, it is the collective responsibility of all the three categories of stakeholders to streamline this vital service.
Early in morning, or at mid-afternoon, images of worn out, noisy and overloaded vans of ancient makes and models, carrying school children with perspiring faces, are most tormenting.
Transporters also complain about the routine fleecing from the policemen. According to them, the system of extortion has now become a meticulously organized enterprise. A recognizable “token” is handed over to the police staff that intercepts the vehicle for the first time. When the negotiated payment is handed over by the driver, the “token” is shown to any other police cop whosoever may stop the vehicle again. On examining the piece of paper and the clandestine code that it represents, the vehicle is allowed to pass unobstructed. In case of argument by the driver, the challans of very high amounts are issued to the erring driver. Since the drivers have to meet the school timings, they do not usually engage into debates and attempt to settle the matter amicably. Under contractual arrangements, where the school management hires the bus contractors, the ordeal for transporters is severe.
School management is a key player in this scenario. However, they happen to be unconcerned about the problems of school transport. Upon questioning, many of them referred this service as outside the ambit of their responsibilities. Few schools did take the initiative of pre-qualifying the transport contractors and assessing the quality of their fleets. The number of such instances was very limited. Common argument was that since the school had no commercial interest in this whole enterprise, they did not bother to exercise control on the routine working of school transport system. Traffic police officials, sounding articulate, threw the entire blame on transporters. They accused the transporters on several counts. Under-qualified drivers lacking basic skills and driving license; declining fitness of the vehicles; overloading; incomplete documents of the vehicle and overspeeding were few common observations cited by traffic police personnel. Some of these shortcomings were a routine cause of accidents.
