School buses under Transport Department scanner in Nellore district

For ensuring utmost safety of schoolchildren, the Transport Department has introduced tough steps for issuing the vehicle fitness certificates and final approvals for the buses being operated by the school managements to transport their students.

This year, rules are made such that each school bus will be personally driven by a Motor Vehicle Inspector before giving fitness certificate. The fitness tests also involve thorough checking of engine condition, head lamps, meshes, painting and so on.

As a strict procedure needs to be followed in this, the department has issued guidelines saying that each MVI should attend fitness issues for just five school buses per day.

Accordingly, as it requires a lot of time to cover all the 1,392 schools buses in the Nellore district, the transport officials have decided to start issuing of fitness certificates early. All the buses will be strictly checked prior to the beginning of the academic year in two months.

Deputy Transport Commissioner N. Sivarama Prasad said that this time the overall health profile and age of the school drivers would also be checked strictly for issuing fitness certificate. Drivers below 60 years of age only should be allowed to drive school buses and their health report needs to be submitted every three months.

Four photos of the buses from all sides and another two photos of their interiors would also be taken.

Online services

The transport has put in a process to ensure transparency in the rendering of transport services with efforts going on to introduce online services in Nellore also to provide relief to the applicants from visiting the transport office.

Mr. Sivarama Prasad said that all steps were being taken to create confidence in the applicants to ensure that they would not consult middlemen. If any agent continued operations in the vicinity of the transport office, criminal cases will be filed against him in the coming days.

Steps are being taken to see that there is no pendency in the applications and each applicant’s service completed in a single day in almost all cases. Mr. Sivarama Prasad said that the Nellore transport unit reached 98 per cent target last year by collecting Rs. 141.67 crore as against the total revenue target of Rs. 142 crore.

This year, a target of Rs. 170.35 crore has been fixed and already Rs. 27 crore is collected in the first month.

Officials to thoroughly check vehicles before issuing fitness certificates in Nellore district