Name schools that didn’t respond to safety directives: HC

Nagpur: Upset over schools' failure to reply to its repeated directives, the Nagpur bench of Bombay High Court on Wednesday asked amicus curiae to prepare a detailed chart of all such schools so that it could take appropriate action on them.

A bench of Justices Bhushan Dharmadhikari and Swapna Joshi directed Firdos Mirza to complete formalities before November 8, the next date of hearing after Diwali vacations.

The court's was hearing a suo motu PIL on death of nine-year-old Virat Zade, a student of Central India Public School, on January 9, 2011. He was crushed under the school bus in Hudkeshwar while returning from school. He went under the bus to collect his tiffin box that had fallen while disembarking from the vehicle. The incident created a huge uproar among citizens.

During last hearing, the court had slapped Rs5,000 fine on 126 schools after Mirza pointed out that all of them plied buses to ferry the students but had failed to secure fitness certificates of those vehicles, thus putting several lives under risk. It also came to fore that despite issuing notices to all 126 schools, only Virat's school had responded so far.

Mirza added that out of 25,369 school buses in Maharashtra, only 13,440 had undergone fitness test of RTO as per court's orders. Over 12,000 buses were plying, including in city, without such certificates. The schools were told to constitute 'school bus committees' that again had not been complied with.

The amicus also pointed out that director of education had issued a circular asking the school bus owners to have CCTV cameras and women conductors and also carry out police verification of drivers and conductors. But hardly any school complied with the directives. On Wednesday, a few schools deposited their fines with the court registry through their counsels but most failed to respond.