Car-pooling: A welcome initiative

By Desaraju Surya
Hyderabad: Car-pooling has just begun in Andhra Pradesh state capital Hyderabad. Tinytots who usually commute to school and back home in their own cars are now sharing the means of transport not only to ease the pressure on their parents' pockets but also decongest the city roads. The car-pooling will also help control pollution that is rapidly on the rise with the spurt in number of vehicles. The car-pooling for school kids began on a small note after a high-ranking official in theChief Minister's Office (CMO) took the initiative with his son and his classmates. "I asked my son to collect details of his classmates who commute on the same route to school. We spoke to their parents and started using a single car instead of many to drop the children at school and bring them back," the CMO official, who did not wish to be identified, said. Thus, from Banjara Hills to Geetanjali Public School at Begumpet, some four-five kids have started travelling by the same car. These parents are not into cost-sharing but rather adopting a rotation system whereby each parent uses his\her car on a day of choice as per convenience. Scores of children are usually dropped at school by their parents in private cars daily causing traffic snarls at all important locations during rush hours. The problem could be felt at Secunderabad, Begumpet, Abids, Narayanaguda, Mehdipatnam, JubileeHills, Banjara Hills, Ameerpet, S R Nagar and other prime localities across the state capital. This is not only resulting in waste of time but also waste of precious fuel, which became dearer after the recent round of price hike. The resultant pollution is adding up to the miseries of one and all. A software is now being developed to enable every school management to create a database on place of stay of children and the modes of transport they are using so that route maps could be prepared to make car-pooling effective. A freelance technocrat B Leela Krishna is designing the software which will be supplied to schools in compact discs. Car-pooling is so far confined to major metros like Mumbai, Delhi and Bengaluru while it is relatively new in Chennai and Pune which have a large number of IT professionals. In Hyderabad, the car-pooling initiative was started just a week ago basically for office-goers. "Right now about 40 people have registered on our free website and started using the car-pool. Another 30-40 people have also shown interest and applied for using the facility," Channel9 Eventz head Srinivas Rahul said. If the car-pooling initiative indeed succeeds, it will augur well for the city traffic and help reduce the pollution levels.