|
|
Roads soaked with children`s blood
Saturday, 4 August 2012 - 11:00 AM SL Time
 Share On Facebook
|
|
|
Children do not seem to be safe anywhere in this country. On Thursday, a school van collided with a private bus, leaving 14 students injured. We have lost count of such mishaps involving school vehicles during the last few years.
School vans are a necessary evil. Public transport has deteriorated to such an extent that people cannot do without them today. They, no doubt, serve a very useful purpose in that the number of State-run school buses is woefully inadequate, but unfortunately they are also a source of danger to children.
School van operators have become a law unto themselves due to lack of regulation. Anything seems to go where school transport is concerned. We have pointed out in these columns umpteen times that the rights of cattle are better protected than those of children in this country. If trucks are overloaded with cattle, they are taken into custody and their drivers fined. But, we are yet to hear of such stern action taken against school vans that carry twice more than their capacity. Fitness of these contraptions and their drivers is taken for granted.
Harm that befalls children on roads should be considered as serious as child abuse and action taken to tackle it. In 2011, according to the police, 223 schoolchildren were killed and 4,100 injured in road accidents. Drivers` negligence has been the main cause of most accidents. A person without one of his hands had been driving a school van for nearly a decade when his disability was detected a few months ago. (However, he, to his credit, had not met with any accident by the time he was forced to stop driving. Ironically, his son has lost a leg at the hands of a reckless driver with both hands intact.)
The school van phenomenon has made a mockery of all rules and regulations governing school admissions as one of our readers suggests in his letter on the opposite page today. A government school is required to adhere to the two-kilometre-radius rule in admitting children. But, the majority of children attending popular schools travel from faraway places. All of them surely cannot be past students` children who constitute a special category or Grade Five Scholarship winners.
The white van has come to be synonymous with abductions and the school van has become a symbol of corruption in Grade One admissions! The phenomenal growth of privately-run school transport system serves as an indictment on successive governments which have failed to provide conveyance to all schoolchildren and establish good schools in semi-urban and rural areas.
Our reader also mentions the Central Colleges which once used to be centres of academic excellence, but they have now been left to wither on the vine, to all intents and purposes. Children have to rise long before the break of dawn and travel to schools in faraway towns, risking life and limb! This kind of schooling is tantamount to torture, we reckon, though parents and children thirsting for good education have been left with no alternative but to undergo suffering.
It is high time the government gave serious thought to developing schools in rural and semi-urban areas to the level of their urban counterparts to make education easily accessible to children in all parts of the country. That is also the way to reduce their travel time considerably and minimise the mad rush of school vehicles along narrow winding congested roads which pass for highways where many innocent lives get snuffed out year in, year out.
|
|
|
|
Search All News and Discussions