Ensuring safety and security for the student community while they are in transit on school buses, Chakraview, a school bus tracking app is aiming to expand its base to up to 100,000 students this year. Earning rave reviews, this tech platform is quickly getting welcomed by both parents and school authorities. Currently operating in Mumbai & Pune, it has around 30,000 parents using this app from over 40 schools.
The tech advantage of Chakraview app
Safety has been of major concern on Indian roads. Surely so, considering the number of road accidents that occur every year. There have been repeated instances of school buses meeting with accidents or school children getting run over. Having said that, these are not the only concerns that a parent has. Over 300 school buses were impounded or challans were issued against them in the period 2019-2020 (pre-pandemic). Apart from that, the schools are at a disadvantage if there is improper route planning and mismanagement of efficiencies. The Chakraview app offers convenient features such as real-time tracking to parents and safety features such as attendance of children while boarding and alighting from the bus. Alerts about the bus and children keep the parents updated, which is necessary with the growing traffic. With this app, schools and bus vendors can manage their fleet in a smart way, collect bus fees, optimise routes, and communicate with parents in more ways than one.
Speaking on this Jaya Bhura, Co-founder of Chakraview explains, “After an incident in April this year when a bus of a reputed school in Mumbai allegedly went missing for a few hours, parents have become extremely sensitive about the safety of their children while commuting in public transport. Chakraview was the need of the hour. It gives the parent and the school administration real-time updates on the student’s well-being and the fleet respectively. Our app can now eliminate erratic bus schedules, poor communication with bus staff, and anxiety about the safety of your school-going child.” A homemaker and a commerce graduate, Jaya was the typical parent concerned about her child’s safety and comfortable transit to and from school. There were systemic gaps and she decided to address that. What therefore goes behind this product, apart from its technology is the passion, determination, and dedication of a concerned parent. “Apart from real-time tracking of the buses, parents get notifications & ETA alerts about the location of the buses as well as notifications about the movement of the child boarding or alighting from the bus,” Jaya adds.
While they have focussed on premium schools and reaching parents through the schools and bus vendors, with the launch of a freemium version of the app, Chakraview aims to penetrate into budget schools and add 100,000 parents directly to its platform. Anil Garg, President of School Bus Owners Association, Maharashtra says, “Chakraview has been designed especially for school buses and is solving a critical problem which could not be solved by the service providers using GPS boxes. One such situation is when routes are merged in special situations – exams, heavy rains, etc. – when routes are merged to send back the students to their respective destinations. The Chakraview driver app provides an option to add up to 10 routes at a time in a single trip.”
In a span of 5 years, Chakraview has grown by leaps and bounds. Today schools, bus operators and parents from Mumbai and Pune rely on this tracking app for the convenience and safety of their children. In the next three years, Chakraview is planning to cater to other cities in India and get more schools & bus operators in its ambit. With this app, the current systemic gaps in school bus operations can be filled to a large extent. The Chakraview GPS system is a quick and helpful solution to ensure safety & security of school children. With the help of this platform, the school authorities can also increase efficiency of their bus operations!