KOLKATA: Parents of children studying in DPS Ruby Park have called for more stringent measures against vehicles that are involved in incidents with school buses, including summary cancellation of the licence of the offending driver.A day after a state bus hit a school bus carrying students to the school near Kankurgachhi, parents of kids, including those traumatised and injured in the accident , said motorists and drivers needed to be extra careful while driving past a school bus to ensure children did not come to harm. “In many countries, an offence against a school bus is considered grave enough to warrant prosecution and cancellation of the offending driver’s licence. But here, the punishment for a bus hitting a truck is the same as that hitting a school bus. This ought to change,” said Archana Sharma, mother of a Class-II student at the school. One of the parents pointed out sensitisation about driving carefully past school buses must begin at the driving schools and should be carried out by cops periodically so that no one can claim ignorance.Students recounted several instances, when public buses racing against each other would come within millimetres of grazing their bus. “I can recount at least two instances, when a speeding bus came so close that had a student kept his or her elbow out of the window, he or she would have lost the arm,” said a student.Some of the children who were injured in Wednesday morning’s incident did not attend school. More than the physical injury, they are battling trauma. Those who did attend school were slightly muted than usual. “It will take a day or two for the students to get over the incident,” a teacher said.Simran Shaw, a Class-IX student whose friend Kush Gupta was on the bus that met with the accident, had initially thought on Wednesday that he was absent. “It was only when he walked in with a bandaged head that we realized he had met with an accident. Kush’s spectacles had broken and he had a gash in his forehead for which he received multiple stitches,” she said. Class-IX student Sahil Gupta’s friends Pratham Agarwal and Adi Jain were also on that bus. “Both Pratham and Adi were knocked against the handle bars in front and suffered bruises in their face and forehead. They were administered pain killers. They didn’t come to school yesterday. They came this morning and told us what had happened,” he said.

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