School cabs flout norms

Does your kid's school cab follow all norms? It is very important for your ward's safety as many cases of accidents are being reported nowadays.

After the rise in accidents, the rules for school cabs have got stricter but it has only raised the fare of the transport as the cabs continue to flout safety norms. Most of the cabs are driven recklessly by untrained drivers.
Very few of these vehicles are registered by the Road Transport Authority (RTA), which has made a set of rules to be followed by the school cabs. It has made mandatory for these cabs to maintain a standard colour, preferably white, and helpline numbers should be painted on both, inside and outside of the vehicle, but hardly a handful abide by these rules.
It has also said that a school cab must have a speed governor, fire extinguisher and a space designed inside the vehicle or on top of it to place school bags. It should also have a first-aid kit. "I am not aware of any such rules to run a school cab," said a cab driver Virender Yadav, who picks and drops children at a play school in Sohna Road for five years.
Even though, it has been made clear by the Gurgaon Traffic Police that a school cab cannot have more than 12 persons including the driver, most of these cabs are overloaded with 15 to 20 children.
Despite these flaws, parents prefer private cabs over school buses. "Unlike the school bus, the cab comes at my doorstep and the driver informs if he is late. That is why, I prefer a cab over a bus for my child," said Vandana Rao, a resident who lives in Mayfeild Garden.
Few days back, the Gurgaon Traffic Police had started a drive against these cabs and also had penalised many vehicles for flouting rules. The authorities had also impounded vehicles and cancelled the licences of a few of them. "From time to time, we keep taking action against these cabs. We are very particular about safety of children in Gurgaon and adopt serious measures to ensure it. Parents must also understand that these cabs are not safe. Recently, we had a meeting with many schools and we had told them that no cab should have more than 12 children and cab should have the place to keep bags of the children on the top of the cab or under the seat and all the children should have seat belts," said DCP (Traffic) Bharti Arora.
RTA senior official Dharmender Singh said, "Strict action will be taken against the violators. As for school cabs, we don't register these kinds of vehicles separately. But under traffic rules, if these cabs are overloaded, they can be impounded and most of the times, we and police do take such punitive action."