A draft bill to keep unregistered school cabs under check is yet to see the light of the day as the state government has not given its consent to it yet.
On June 16, the Transport Department had issued a draft notification making it mandatory for cabs transporting schoolchildren to register themselves as ‘School Cabs’.
Meanwhile, the number of school cabs has been steeply rising, with over 8,000 such cabs now plying across the city.
When questioned, the Transport Department officials claimed that they are still waiting for objections from the public, before implementing the rule.
The officials had claimed that they would wait for public objections against this for a month, after which the rule would be implemented strictly.
However, the department is still unaware about why the rule has not received a nod from the government.
“There are about 8,000 to 10,000 such school cabs plying unofficially. Our draft made it mandatory for these cabs to first get a registration and we had
listed a set of things they need to do-like paint their vehicle in a certain colour and stick to the capacity specified. However, we have not been able to regularise these cabs as the government is sleeping over this draft,” explained Vijay Vikram, joint commissioner, Transport Department.
Explaining further, Joint Commissioner Hemant Kumar said, “There are about 5,000 school cabs that are registered by schools under the headmasters’ name. However, we found the unofficial ones problematic. There were complaints about them violating traffic rules. This is the reason we wanted to crackdown on them.”
With the government not being able to implement this rule, the traffic violations committed by these school cabs is only on the rise.