To the administrators of Hyderabad street accident tolls used to be mere statistics in police files. Five-year-old N. Rithika may have changed that.
The kindergarten pupil of St Ann’s was mowed down by a DCM Toyota as she stepped out of school on Thursday. Her funeral yesterday sparked city-wide calls for road safety and seemed to have shaken the government awake.
"The lives of children are precious. No one involved in the accident will be spared," chief minister Y.S. Rajasekhar Reddy told a city where four schoolchildren died on the roads this week.
Reddy had held an emergency meeting on the issue immediately after he returned from Chennai this morning.
"I have already pulled up the police and municipal administration. I told them they must ensure that such accidents do not happen again,” he said. “What we want to do now is take measures that will help make Hyderabad a city everyone would love to live in."
The chief minister blamed the state's burgeoning car and two-wheeler traffic for the lack of safety on the roads. "Cars and scooters increased five times in the last three years."
The government has already slapped a notice on St Ann’s, holding the school responsible for Rithika's death. District collector Aravind Kumar said that under the Indian Penal Code, a school has to ensure safe transport for its pupils.
The school management, however, refuses to accept blame. “We are not responsible for anything that happens outside our compound,” said the principal, Sister Anthoniamma.
The state human rights commission, too, has issued notices to the school, the police and civic officials, asking them to appear before it on August 19. The commission’s chairman, Justice (retd) B. Subhashan Reddy, said a suo motu case has been registered.
Groups of municipal and police officials travelled from school to school today, inspecting transport arrangements and the approach from the gates to the main roads.
They found that hardly a tenth of the 5,500 schools in the city and its neighbourhood, which teach nearly 20 lakh children, have done anything to ensure safe travel for its students.
