BENGALURU: A day after TOI highlighted how students spent up to 2.5 hours in school buses to travel a few kilometres on the Varthur-Gunjur stretch (SH-35), the situation on Friday was marginally better. Parents said schoolchildren remained stuck in long traffic queues on their commute home, maybe a few minutes less than Thursday. But stuck, they were.Fresh complaints kept pouring in from citizens, particularly the large tech workforce residing along the corridor. Amit Jain, a resident of the Varthur-Gunjur stretch, said his LKG-going child was stuck in traffic for more than an hour on Friday. “My child’s school is 4km from our home. While the school made some changes to student dispersal today, it still took over 1 hour and 15 minutes to cover the distance. Yesterday, the journey took nearly 2.5 hours,” he said.Describing the ordeal faced by young children, Jain added: “The moment my child reached home today, the first thing he wanted to do was use the washroom. Imagine what these children go through while sitting inside buses for hours in traffic without any certainty about when they will reach home.”Jain said the situation has left parents anxious and constantly monitoring school bus apps. “We keep worrying. Is the child OK? Is there a medical emergency? These are our thoughts. No parent should go through this stress every single day,” he said.Parents’ frustration has spilled onto social media as well. One resident, Arjun, posted on X that he eventually left home to pick up his daughter midway through her journey after tracking the bus’s slow movement. “After waiting for nearly two hours, I picked up my daughter from the road. Otherwise, she would have taken another 45 minutes to reach home. I run an online bus business and had the flexibility to do that. What about parents who are in offices and cannot leave work?” he wrote.Another resident, Neeraj Agarwal, said children should not be subjected to the hardships that many Bengaluru professionals have come to accept.Residents said unless bottlenecks along SH-35 are addressed and ongoing infrastructure work is expedited, schoolchildren will continue to bear the brunt of Bengaluru’s traffic woes.
