Tracking kids on their bus journey to school is now at fingertips. Chief Minster Pinarayi Vijayan inaugurated “Vidhya Vahan” - the mobile app developed by Kerala Motor Vehicles Department(KMVD) to track status of school buses plying to and fro schools. CM switched the App on, marking the inaugural in a ceremony venued at Chief Minister’s chamber.
The App will allow parents to access the real-time location, speed and other alerts. Also the parents can call the driver or attender directly using the App.
The App uses KMVD’s existing Suraksha Mitra platform. The App comes free-of-cost. All parents need to do is contact school authorities and register into the App by providing their mobile numbers.
The parents have to contact the school authorities to register their mobile numbers. The registered users get the app service free of cost. The MVD has started a toll-free helpline 18005997099 to clear doubts.
The app is based on the 'Surakha-Mitr' platform of the MVD. The department has mandated all school buses be connected with a GPS machine. The control centre keeps a track of all vehicles connected with the GPS.
The GPS-enabled tracking of school buses planned by the Motor Vehicles department (MVD) in the new academic year with the support of a mobile application has again hit a roadblock due to the delay in data entry by schools in the district and technical glitches. The Vidhya Vahan mobile application, which was launched as part of the project to enable parents and school managements to track buses, also remains unutilised.
The instruction of the MVD to upload students’ details to the app is yet to be carried out by school managements in the district. The plan of the MVD was to complete the data entry work in two weeks after the school reopening.
Even after a month, not even a single school in the city has completed the work, and parents who have a downloaded the android application are not getting its benefits. Only a very few private schools in the district now have the individual GPS-based tracking system.
In Kozhikode district, the project was supposed to cover over 700 educational institution vehicles in the first phase. On completion of the data entry work, it could cover about 1,000 vehicles. There were efforts on the part of the MVD and the police to check the fitness of all school buses ahead of the new academic year to experiment with the new project.
According to MVD officials, parents would be able to access the service using their mobile number only after the completion of the data uploading work by the schools concerned.
Meanwhile, representatives of some of the school managements said there was no proper coordination on the part of officials to complete the task on time. There was also a lack of proper awareness programmes about the new tracking system.
The GPS-enabled tracking system was proposed in the district nearly 10 years ago as a safety measure for students. It was the difficulties in managing an exclusive server for the purpose that delayed the implementation of the project.
