Catch them young?

"Attendance is compulsory for all the students [of classes VI to XII] and strict action will be taken against the absentees." This order, which follows a Directorate of Education note, has been issued by several Delhi schools to students to make a grand success of Prime Minister Narendra Modi's live address on Teachers' Day. Since the address begins at 3 p m and goes on till 4.45 p m, this means students get to leave school only by 5 p m - the highly-avoidable rush hour when Delhi's infamous traffic is at its impatient best. It so happens that several schools rely on the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) buses to ferry students to and from school. In the evenings, once DTC is done with the schools, its buses cater to the office crowd. And DTC has firmly declined to change that routine, not even for the prime minister and his much-publicised speech. So the schools have issued another circular "appealing" to parents to make arrangements to collect their wards from school at 5 pm because, as they reiterate, "attendance is compulsory". But the word "appeal" is something of an understatement: in one school, children were unofficially told that non-attendance would attract a fine of Rs 1,200.