Shankar Musafir The ‘neighbourhood criteria’ has environmental, economic and social ramifications Admission to the nursery classes in most schools in Delhi has been a controversial issue. Added to this, the B K Ganguly Committee Report on nursery admissions has also caused a huge uproar. The committee was formed on the recommendation of the Delhi High Court to review a petition1 against interviewing parents at the time of admissions to nursery school. The private school fraternity and many parents are not happy about it. But there is at least one important point in the report which will make environmentalists/educationists happy. A section of the report has to do with a child’s residence near the school as a criterion for admission – ‘the neighbourhood criterion’. Initially, the report mentioned 3 km as the radius that the school should consider. After protests from parents and schools this radius was increased. Nevertheless, this condition makes a lot of sense, environmentally. Every school invariably finds itself surrounded by vehicles both the school transport and private vehicles twice daily – when the school opens and when it closes. The reason – most students commuting to school use either the school bus or their private vehicles. With the ‘blue line fiasco’2, failure of public transport and increasing affluence among people, the number of parents dropping their kids to school has increased. The result is an increase in the number of traffic jams outside schools. As transport planners have been saying, more people should use public transport. A bus can carry more passengers than a car and occupies less space. This means that there will be less traffic and congestion on the roads. Not bad advice at all! More children need to use public or school buses rather than create traffic jams by using their own cars. But this is not merely a traffic problem. A study by the Central Institute of Road Transport, Pune, finds that a car consumes nearly six times more energy per passenger per km than an average bus. Hence, public transport makes sense even from the point of view of saving fuel. These days children travel enormous distances to reach their schools and get back home. Not only does the fuel spent impact the environment through emissions, there are many limitations unaccounted for. The time taken to travel eats into a child’s time to play. The child when he comes back home only has enough time to finish homework. This is stressful and has a negative impact on