What began as an ordinary rainy Monday with yellow buses rolling out to carry children to school ended up in hours of panic and anxiety for parents after the students remained trapped inside the buses for nearly four hours on waterlogged roads in Gurugram. The water was deep enough to almost completely cover the bus tyres, leaving no option for the children but to remain inside the vehicles.
After nearly four hours of frantic phone calls by parents to the school authorities and administration, officials managed to rescue the children - with the help of a crane - one of the students' father, Achyut Mohan Sharma, told NDTV.
"We spoke to the school transport department. They arranged for alternate buses because one after the other, each bus broke down on that particular patch. Now, even the other buses couldn't reach. So finally, the authorities brought in a crane, and with that, they pushed the bus ahead to a certain point. The children and those present inside were then shifted to another bus," he said.
Recalling the incident, Sharma said there was immense panic and anxiety among the parents.
"As the bus broke down near Subhash Chowk, the teachers informed it to us through a broadcast group on WhatsApp. Our immediate reaction to that was panic. We wanted to understand where our children were...both my wife and I were frantically trying to reach out to authorities and also to the rest of the parents to see if one of us could reach the location earlier than the other," he said.
Sharma told NDTV that while he too tried to reach the location, the usual 20-minute stretch was taking him around 50 minutes.
"This was about 1-1:15 pm. It was raining quite heavily back then, and because of all of the conundrum, the roads were flooded, and, because of the domino effect, there was a traffic jam on the road, so I couldn't reach in time," he said.
After some time, one of the parents was near the area where the students were stuck. "But even that 15-20 minute route took them about 40 to 45 minutes to reach," he said, adding that the parent eventually parked their car somewhere and waded through knee-deep water to reach the bus.
"We were all terrified. There were potholes, there was risk of electrocution with the electric poles around. We all decided that the best course of action was for everyone to just stay on the bus and have either the authorities or the school figure something out until and unless there is a better path for us to sort of exit. It's safer to be on the bus, stranded, than make an exit," he said.
'Children were crying'
Sharma said that while his son managed to stay calm, there were many children crying on the bus.
"So, initially there was panic, but then once we were able to speak to him over the phone via the teacher, he was okay. Eventually, he started sort of feeling adventurous for lack of a better word, but then there were other children we could hear who were crying in the background. Some were hungry, obviously. It was afternoon time, lunchtime. The more tricky piece actually for them was the washroom...With both genders on the bus, it was tricky for them to figure out as to how to sort of go to the washroom during this time," he said.
'System needs to do better'
The child's father asserted that the "system needs to do better" with civic facilities and the drainage system.
"With the amount of brain power and the money that we have as India, as Gurugram, we need to do better in terms of the civic facilities, the drainage systems. If the school and the parents can do this much to be able to reach the children and sort of extract them from the situation, I think our bureaucracy and our systems should be able to implement measures so that something like this does not happen again. We owe it to our children and the rest of the ecosystem," he said.
