(file image for representation)
| Photo Credit: THULASI KAKKAT
With the school-college study tour and field trip season beginning, Kerala’s Motor Vehicles department (MVD) has started a crackdown on tourist buses equipped with illegal strobe lights, loud sound systems, and jury-rigged cabin lighting that mimics discotheque dance floors.
Transport Commissioner C.H. Nagaraju told The Hindu that the tourist bus accident, which claimed the lives of nine students of a school in Kochi and injured scores of others, including teachers, at Vadakanchery in Palakkad in 2022, had woken the administration to the perils of the unregulated tourist bus rental industry.
He said the Kerala High Court had also taken serious note of the mishap and ordered the government to crack down on such tourist buses, which brazenly violate road safety norms and MVD rules.
Another MVD official said the department ordered a renewed enforcement drive after investigators found that tourist bus owners were more in breach of government regulations to capture business in the highly competitive college-school tour market.
Moreover, the owners, officials said, used social media handles to promote their business, with videos of students dancing in moving buses and riding shotgun in the driver’s cabin, even while the vehicle negotiates winding roads en route to popular high-range tourist destinations such as Idukki in Kerala and Ooty and Kodaikanal in Tamil Nadu.
“Turning passenger cabins into dance floors during high-speed travel could jeopardise the vehicle’s stability, leading to accidents”, an official said.
Fire safety
The MVD has also raised serious doubts about the fire safety of such vehicles, given the additional wiring for the lights and devices, such as smoke dispensers, which create a haze in the cabin to enhance lighting and sound effects. “An electrical overload exacerbated by faulty wiring could cause onboard fire accidents”, an official said.
The MVD was also in touch with their counterparts in other southern States after 29 persons onboard a private sleeper bus had a fortunate escape after a sleeper bus caught fire at Nalgonda in Telangana recently. (Bus fire accidents, including in Kurnool in Andhra Pradesh in October and Rajasthan in September, had claimed 45 lives).
The MVD has instructed school and college authorities to share details of the tourist buses they charter for field trips so that inspectors can examine the vehicles before the journey.
The management should inform the MVD of the time of journey start, destination, and expected time of return for random road checks. Moreover, the government has stated that it would bring the institutions under the ambit of the investigation in the event of a mishap.
Published – November 15, 2025 11:23 am IST
