No Place to Park? Well, the road is all yours

No Place to Park? Well, the road is all yours

ByNeha Sethi

Photo Jaishree

There is a traffic jam on the road outside Delhi Public School (DPS), Mathura Road. It is the same scene every morning and afternoon. And is the school getting away with it just because it is one of the top educational institutions in the capital?“There is a lot of chaos on the stretch in front of DPS, Mathura Road everyday, especially in the morning, when parents come to drop their children. All of them park their cars on the main road and then it’s a problem for people like us who travel through that stretch everyday,” says Arshdeep Kaur, a nurse in Escorts Hospital, who has to commute through Mathura road.The traffic outside DPS becomes unmanageable in the morning and afternoon, but it gets even worse if there is an event taking place in the school.The 23rd of August, a Saturday, was a particularly torturous day for Seema Kapoor, a 24-year old who has her office in Okhla. This was because the same day was also when DPS had their parent-teacher meeting. “It was complete chaos,” she says “Cars were parked on both the sides of the main road. And at some points, there were two lanes of cars.”So where does the solution to this problem lie? Muktesh Chander, the Additional Commissioner of Police, Traffic Police, puts the responsibility back on the people’s head. “The people should call the traffic help line and inform us about such traffic jams. It is also the school’s responsibility to tell us before hand so that we are prepared for it. Actually the main problem is that there is no law of Government of Delhi which says that it is compulsory for all schools to have a parking space. Most schools face this problem especially in the afternoon, when parents come to pick their children,” he says.But try to talk to the school authorities and the Principal is not available for comment. An official from the Principal’s office, who didn’t want to be named, clarifies the school’s position. “A part of our land was taken away during the construction of the flyover in front of our school before the ASIAD games and we were promised a parking lot to compensate for that part of land,” he says. “A request regarding the compensation of land has been sent to many officials including the PWD, the Mayor of Delhi, Arti Mehra, the Police Commissioner, the Deputy Commissioner of MCD and the MP of our area, but to no avail,” he adds.The parents, on the other hand, say that they have no other option other than parking on the road. Sushma Bhasin, mother of a child studying in DPS says, “What option do we have other than parking on the road? It is up to the school authorities and the traffic police to come up with a solution, it’s not our problem.”So, till all the parties involved arrive on a consensus on who is actually to be blamed, commuters like Seema have no other option but to find out a way to avoid that route.