Every morning before eight, vans packed with schoolbags and children pull out of Srinagar’s by-lanes and the district towns beyond. Three to a seat meant for one. A child kneeling by the sliding door. Another perched on the gear cover because the last row filled up two streets ago. No seatbelt, no first-aid box, no fire extinguisher. This is not a rare lapse caught on a bad day. It is the daily commute of lakhs of Kashmir’s schoolchildren.
That image should unsettle a society that measures its schools by board results and toppers’ photographs on the front page. When the Regional Transport Office ran surprise checks on school routes this year, it found “almost all” vans in violation of basic safety norms, the very norms the Supreme Court laid down for school transport back in 1997. Twenty-nine years on, the law is not the problem. Enforcement is.
Credit is due where it belongs. The RTO’s crackdown was overdue but real, and it forced the issue into the open. The Deputy Commissioner of Srinagar has ordered a full safety audit of coaching centres, many of which run out of congested, multi-storey buildings without fire exits, smoke detectors, or extinguishers. And after the Supreme Court’s July 2025 directions in Sukdeb Saha versus State of Andhra Pradesh, the Jammu and Kashmir government has constituted District Level Monitoring Committees, chaired by Deputy Commissioners, to track student mental health and suicide risk. A seventeen-year-old Class 12 student’s suicide this January, blamed on academic pressure, is the kind of case these committees now exist to prevent.
But committees and crackdowns cannot substitute for accountability that runs through the whole chain. Transport operators cut private deals with parents while schools wash their hands the moment the last bell rings. Schools that outsource transport without contracts or audits are outsourcing responsibility, not danger. Coaching centres advertise cent-percent results while operating unregistered, months after the Directorate of School Education Kashmir set a registration deadline. And parents, under pressure themselves, keep choosing the cheaper, crammed van because the safer one costs more.
This is an old pattern wearing a new headline. A rule is written, a tragedy exposes its neglect, an inspection follows, and then attention moves on until the next van skids or the next result season claims another young life. Kashmir’s children are owed more than cyclical outrage.
Article 21 of the Constitution guarantees the right to life, not the right to a rank card. A valley that prizes its children’s futures on paper must first guarantee they survive the ordinary business of getting to school and coping with an exam. Toppers’ photographs fade from the front page within a week. An empty seat at home does not.
A mark sheet can be repeated next year. A child cannot.
