City cops challan school bus, 87 underage drivers

Ludhiana: The traffic cops on Wednesday challaned a school bus for wrong parking and picking up school kids from the middle of the road. Besides this, 87 under-age drivers have been issued challans under a special drive kick-started by the traffic police last week.
Till Wednesday, the police have challaned 420 underage individuals under the same.
Sharing more information, assistant commissioner of police (ACP) Traffic-1 Charanjiv Lamba said, “We ensure that school authorities should follow the safe vahan (vehicle) scheme. However, the school bus which was challaned was parked in the middle of the main road to pick up students, posing a threat on kids’ safety.
“It also didn’t have an attendant onboard. School authorities shrugged off their responsibilities as they claimed to have outsourced the service to a private contractor. Here, schools have to look after the maintenance of vehicles and follow all instructions under the safe vahan scheme.”
Lamba added, “Further, 87 individuals have also been challaned on Wednesday and one vehicle has been impounded. 82 of these challans have been issued under Section-199A of the Motor Vehicles Act. The details of students and vehicles challaned will be shared with the regional transport authority (RTA) to ensure due implementation of the law with regard to ensuring non-issuance of driving licences to the offenders till the age of 25.”
The traffic officials have also started an awareness campaign on educating students of schools and colleges on traffic rules, and they visited BCM Arya Senior Secondary School and RS Model Senior Secondary School at Shastri Nagar for the same.