Wreck on the highway

Laws barring overcrowding to be enforced, schools penalised for violating safety rules while taking children on trips

Right now we can only mourn with the parents of the children who never came back from a school trip to the Kallar Kahar and Khewra Salt Mines area, located about an-hour-and-a-half out of Islamabad. At least 37 people died in the horrendous accident as the bus carrying the children back to Faisalabad and the Millat Grammar School to which they belonged overturned while travelling along the Lahore-Islamabad Motorway as a result of brake failure. Pupils of the school, the vice-principal and the driver of the bus were among the dead and the toll could rise with some 60 admitted to hospital.

On first thought it is easy to dismiss the terrible tragedy as an unavoidable mishap; an act of God that could not have been prevented. But they are aspects that need to be thought about in some depth. The bus was in the first place overloaded. With a capacity for 72 it was carrying 107 people. Accounts say that many of the passengers, including the students from classes six and seven, were standing when the bus turned over. According to reports they were the ones who died almost instantly, as the driver gave a warning of brake failure. The accident occurred moments later, before the vice principal’s suggestion that everyone jump from the vehicle could be put into effect.

Bodies will be carried back to many homes in Faisalabad and the villages around it to which many of the pupils belonged. There are lessons to be learnt. This is not the first time students have boarded an overcrowded bus; we see such sights everyday as schoolchildren go to school across the country, often clinging precariously onto the back of vans or buses; crammed rickshaws take others to school. A better system needs to be put in place to make their lives safer. Laws that bar overcrowding must be enforced and schools which violate basic safety rules while taking children on school trips also penalised in order to prevent more tragedies of the kind we saw as what should have been an educational and recreational experience turned into a nightmare.

Published in The Express Tribune, September 28^th, 2011.