Assistant Superintendent of Police S. Sarvesh Raj, Regional Transport officer K. Selvakumar, police personnel and motor vehicle inspectors watched in awe as Collector S. Natarajan crawled under a school bus and checked the chassis and drove a bus to check the brakes.
Detracting from the usual practice of launching the annual inspection of school buses for issuing Fitness Certificates (FC) before the start of the new academic year by posing for photograph, the Collector took the police and transport officials by surprise when he called for a mat and crawled under the bus.
After emerging out, Mr. Natarajan, an engineering graduate, who had studied automobiles as an elective, drove a bus and checked the braking system during the inspection here on Thursday. “I wanted to drive home the point that the inspection to ensure safety of school children should not be customary,” he told The Hindu .
Sharing his expertise on automobiles, he advised the vehicle inspectors to thoroughly check the school buses before giving the FC. The vehicles should be 100% safe for children, he stressed.
The RTO and his team checked more than 400 buses on the first day and found 28 of them not fit for issuing FC, Mr. Selvakumar said.
These buses had no proper fire extinguishers, first aid boxes and door and floor systems, he said.
The school managements have been asked to rectify the faults and present the buses for fresh inspection before the reopening of the schools, he added. There were 656 school buses in the district and all the buses would be issued FC only after thorough checking with special focus on safety aspects, he said.
The RTO was assisted by motor vehicle inspectors S. Viswanathan and M. Manickam in the inspection. They checked speed governors, emergency exits, fire extinguishers, height of footboards, driver cabin, bag racks, window grills, reflecting lights and tapes, he also said.
Inspection of school buses became mandatory after a six-year-old girl was run over by the bus, in which she was travelling after she slipped through a hole on the floor of the bus and fell down near Chennai in July 2012.
