Hyderabad: School safety zones a la Pune urged in city

Hyderabad: Inspired by the concept of safe school zones that has been introduced by the Pune Municipal Corporation, members of the Hyderabad Cycling community have urged the State Government to adopt a similar concept in the city and introduce school zoning zones \ safe school zones that will help to improve junctions for the safety of the commuting students.

In that regard, members of the Hyderabad Cycling community have begun an awareness campaign to make citizens aware of the advantages of safe school zone and also share the benefits of how it is fruitfully functioning in Pune. To take forward this project, they are also in talks with officials of GHMC, traffic police, HMDA and school management.

Speaking to the Hans India, Santhana Selvan, bicycle mayor of Hyderabad, said, “Our community’s main aim is to see our kids and grandkids to start walking, cycling and using public transportation for their daily commute. In order to achieve that, there are various steps. School Zoning Zones is one among them. But sadly in our city, it has not been implemented and in every area let it be Madhapur, Secunderabad, Uppal, LB Nagar, we can see clusters of schools and colleges within 1-2 km radius.”

Highlighting the School Zoning Zones, he said the aim of the project is to make and facilitate all the roads in and around school zones in our city to be safe. “School safety zoning is an important activity and it can be done in a phase-wise manner. At the initial stage, a particular junction is taken up for improvement, which will include setting up speed breakers near school locations, proper pedestrian crossings, zebra crossings, traffic signals, 24x7 CCTV cameras, etc.

The traffic police should be available during peak hours, the speed of vehicles should be controlled by traffic police and many more. Most importantly, the government has to set a rule that the speed of vehicles should not exceed 25 km/hr. A similar concept of a safe school zone was introduced by the Pune Municipal Corporation in 2022. Taking a cue from this, we got an idea of why we cannot have this similar concept implemented over here. This project involves the coordination of various departments such as GHMC, traffic police and also civil society,” he said.

“At present, we are in talks with various government officials and school management. A lot of awareness is needed, so we have started an awareness drive and our community members are auditing the project by visiting the various localities and gathering the details so we can take forward and implement this project as soon as possible,” added Selvan.