Nagpur: With schools across Nagpur district set to reopen on June 23 for the 2025-26 academic session, a damning transport crisis is unfolding right under the nose of transport authorities. A staggering 837 school buses and vans are currently operating without valid fitness certificates — a blatant violation of safety norms that puts the lives of thousands of children at daily risk. Even more alarming is the silent operation of hundreds of unauthorized, unregistered vehicles — mostly vans and autorickshaws — ferrying schoolchildren illegally and unchecked, an official data revealed.
Out of 3,964 vehicles registered with the three Regional Transport Offices (RTOs) — City, East, and Rural — only 3,127 possess valid fitness certificates. The rest have either expired or skipped mandatory inspection altogether, raising serious questions about the enforcement capacity and intent of the RTOs. And that’s just the official data — it doesn’t account for the mushrooming “shadow fleet” of private vehicles operating beyond any legal or safety oversight.
Gold Rate
10 july 2025
These unauthorized vehicles — unregistered with RTOs, often overloaded, and structurally unfit — continue to ply with impunity, making a mockery of Rule 10 of the School Bus Code. The Code mandates compliance with 27 safety features, including speed governors, emergency exits, panic buttons, and iron grilles on windows. A fitness certificate is a basic prerequisite to ensure these standards are met — yet hundreds of vehicles operate daily without it.
The breakdown is damning:
• Deputy RTO (East): Of 1,227 vehicles (430 buses and 797 vans), 297 vehicles — including 36 buses and 261 vans — are running with expired fitness.
• City RTO: Out of 858 school vehicles (438 buses and 420 vans), 202 vehicles — 96 buses and 106 vans — lack valid certification.
• Nagpur Rural RTO: Of 1,879 vehicles, 138 remain uncertified.
In total, 837 school transport vehicles are violating fitness regulations across Nagpur district — that’s more than one-fifth of the registered fleet. And yet, enforcement has been lax, ineffective, or entirely missing.
The complicity of inaction is impossible to ignore. Repeated calls to tighten enforcement have yielded little beyond token gestures. Meanwhile, cash-strapped parents — unaware of these safety violations or lacking alternatives — are left with no choice but to send their children in overcrowded, potentially dangerous vehicles.
This is not just a regulatory lapse — it is a systemic failure that has turned the roads of Nagpur into high-risk zones for schoolchildren. If immediate, decisive action is not taken against uncertified and illegal school transport operators, it will not be long before this negligence leads to a tragedy that was entirely preventable.
