Chennai: A public interest litigation has been filed in the Madras high court to direct the authorities to make it mandatory, installing CCTV cameras with GPS in all the school buses, plying in the state, from this academic year.
A division bench comprising Justices C. V. Karthikeyan and Krishnan Ramasamy before whom the PIL filed by advocate S.Gopi Krishnan came up for hearing ordered notice, returnable by 1st week of June, to the Director of School Education, Director of Directorate of Matriculation School Board, State Transport Authority and state education secretary.
In his PIL, Gopi Krishnan submitted that he has two school going children and they are going by school bus. An English daily in its edition dated February 2, 2019 published a news item that in Coimbatore a private school van driver and cleaner were arrested for sexually assaulting a 4-year-old girl inside a bus near Mettupalayam on January 29, 2019.
This incident prompted him to file the present PIL in order to safeguard the interest of the school going children. All school buses were certified as mechanically fit by the State Transport Authority in consultation of the Directors of School and Matriculation School Board. That alone was not sufficient to safeguard the interest of the school going children.
Now, the technology has advanced so much that CCTV camera attached with Global Positioning System can be installed in all the buses so that the individual schools can monitor the movement of the school bus. The school concerned can also create a website to monitor the movement of the school bus and the same
can be also downloaded by the parents so that they can also monitor the movement of the school bus.
