Gurgaon: Schoolchildren were left stranded in multiple buses that got stuck on flooded stretches — mostly at Mor Chowk, Jharsa, Narsinghpur, Sohna Road and Subhash Chowk — on Tuesday afternoon as monsoon’s first heavy spell of rain showed how quickly the city can become dysfunctional.It took these students, from classes 4 to 12, four to five hours to get home, leaving school at 2.30 pm and arriving only by 7.30 pm, exhausted, hungry and distressed. Traffic jams and waterlogging meant parents could not go and get them either. Children shared what was left of their lunch — biscuits, half-eaten sandwiches or parathas, among themselves. With no access to washrooms, those who needed one simply had to hold on, parents TOI spoke to on Wednesday said.A Class 4 student of DAV Public School in Sector 14, who left school at 2.30 pm, reached home only at 6.15 pm. She ate lunch around noon, her mother said, and by the time she finally walked through the door, she was famished and close to tears. “For adults, sitting in traffic is frustrating,” her mother said. “For a 9-year-old child, sitting inside a bus for almost four hours without food or a washroom is a completely different experience.”Across the city, a similar unease was building, minute by minute, at stops where schoolbuses did not come at the scheduled time. Shilpi Verma’s daughter, a Class 4 student at Shiksha School, is usually dropped home by 3.20 pm. Verma said the bus arrived at 4.20 pm. “My daughter told me kids on her bus shared water, biscuits and leftover snacks with friends as they waited for the traffic to clear,” she said.On another bus, younger children began to cry from hunger as the hours wore on, and teachers on board did what they could to soothe them, though there was little to be done.Archana Gulati’s nephew, a Class 9 student who travels from Sun City, left school at his usual time but sat in the bus for nearly three hours as it got stuck in traffic. “Some of his classmates did not reach home until 7.30 pm. Imagine leaving home in the morning, attending class all day, and reaching home late evening,” Gulati said. “It is physically and mentally exhausting for children.”Several parents said they felt helpless knowing their children were sitting somewhere in the city, waiting, while they themselves were stuck in the same rain and the same traffic, unable to do anything but wait too. When the buses at last began rolling in, many parents were already at the stops with water bottles and snacks in hand, braced for children who would arrive starving and spent.
School buses stranded as traffic crawls on the Delhi-Gurgaon Expressway on Tuesday
“My daughter kept calling again and again to ask when she would be home,” a parent, whose daughter studies at a school in Sector 15, barely 6km from their home in Subhash Chowk, said. “Because of the traffic, it was not possible for me to get her either. I simply did not have any answer for her,” she said, adding that her daughter came home nearly two hours late.The physical toll, parents said, showed up later, in headaches, fatigue and dehydration among children who had sat still for hours in the humidity.Schools tried to keep families informed. Teachers assigned to bus duty stayed with the students the entire time, one principal said, relaying updates through parent communication groups and doing what they could to keep the children calm and comfortable until every one of them was safely home.But for many parents, reassurance was not the point. What they wanted to know was why no plan exists for days like this one — days schools can see coming, given how far in advance weather alerts are issued. “Schools should shift to online classes, stagger dismissal timings or shut for the day when heavy rain is predicted,” Gulati said. “Children should not have to face such conditions every monsoon.”The ones answerable aren’t schools, but the city’s administration, which has year after year presided over a worsening problem of waterlogging., which has now become chronic.Following Tuesday’s experience, several families chose to keep their children home on Wednesday.
A school bus fell into a drain at Narsinghpur after heavy rain on Tuesday
At DPS Sector 45, principal Aditi Misra said four of the school’s buses were caught in the gridlock, with a journey that normally takes around 45 minutes stretching to nearly four hours for several students before they reached home safely. The school subsequently shifted to hybrid classes, and attendance on Wednesday dropped to about 15%, prompting it to allow students to join lessons online.Amity International School, Sector 43, said it would continue with physical classes while strengthening its safety arrangements for school transport. “We will also endeavour to start the buses around 10 minutes earlier so that children can reach home on time and avoid peak traffic congestion,” principal Dr Anshu Arora said. She said students delayed due to traffic congestion would be allowed to report late without inconvenience, while dispersal during heavy rain would be managed from the reception area instead of multiple exit points to ensure safe boarding.
