From now on, school students will monitor and regulate vehicular traffic near schools with the city traffic police on Saturday inducting about 3,000 school traffic commandos.
Sporting red jackets as uniforms, the school students, mostly from high schools, will arrive at the respective schools a bit early to regulate vehicular traffic in the mornings and in the evenings after the school hours.
Each school will have 25 school traffic commandos and everyday five students would monitor traffic on shift basis. Students from over 125 schools in the city were trained by traffic constables about road safety and traffic rules for a month. In the last five days, there were specially trained for the induction ceremony, said Additional Commissioner of Police (Traffic) C.V. Anand.
Braving the continuous drizzle, over 640 school traffic commandos participated in traffic drills at the Police Hockey stadium, Begumpet. They exhibited their skills in regulating traffic in a mock three-road and four-road junctions.
“Being a traffic commando feels to be honoured. We are supposed to ensure the safety of our fellow students and it's a challenging job,” said Praveen, ninth standard student of Gujrati Mahavidyalaya. Police Commissioner A.K. Khan said the traffic police should ensure there are zero accidents or injuries to school students this year in the city.
Badminton World No. 2 Saina Nehwal and actor D. Venkatesh were chief guests for the programme. “It's a good initiative by traffic police to introduce school traffic commandos. Most students are in a hurry to arrive at the school in time and at times this results in accidents or injuries which should be curbed,” said Saina Nehwal.
Arrival of film actor Venkatesh brought in cheers from students. He advised school commandos to follow traffic rules, though arriving at the school an hour before the regular time was surely going to be tough.
