Schoolchildren travelling along Bengaluru’s Varthur-Gunjur stretch remained trapped in long traffic queues on Friday, with one parent saying his LKG-going child took more than 75 minutes to cover a four-kilometre journey home. The disruption continued a day after students were reported to have spent up to 2.5 hours in school buses on the same corridor.
The affected route is State Highway 35, which connects the Varthur-Gunjur area and serves a large residential population, including many technology workers. Parents said traffic conditions on Friday were only marginally better than on Thursday, even after some schools changed their student dispersal arrangements.
Amit Jain, a resident of the Varthur-Gunjur stretch, said his child’s school was about 4km from home but the journey took over an hour and 15 minutes on Friday. The previous day, he said, the same trip had taken nearly 2.5 hours.
“The moment my child reached home today, the first thing he wanted to do was use the washroom,” Jain said, describing the difficulty faced by young children during prolonged bus journeys. He said children were left sitting in traffic without certainty about when they would reach home, while parents remained anxious about possible medical emergencies or other problems during the commute.
Jain said parents were constantly monitoring school bus applications to track their children’s location. The disruption has also prompted some parents to intervene directly. A resident identified as Arjun said on X that he left home to collect his daughter midway through her journey after tracking the bus’s slow progress.
“After waiting for nearly two hours, I picked up my daughter from the road. Otherwise, she would have taken another 45 minutes to reach home,” he wrote. Arjun added that he was able to leave work because he runs an online bus business, but questioned how parents working from offices could respond in similar circumstances.
The traffic delays have affected more than school transport. Residents said complaints were continuing to come from citizens living along the corridor, including members of Bengaluru’s technology workforce. Neeraj Agarwal, another resident, said children should not have to endure conditions that many professionals in the city have gradually come to accept as part of daily travel.
The continuing disruption places school buses among the most visible casualties of congestion on the Varthur-Gunjur route. Long travel times can extend the school day for young children and make it harder for parents to plan work, childcare and emergency responses. In the reported cases, the problem was not limited to a single vehicle or isolated delay, but affected multiple families travelling along the same corridor.
Residents said the situation would continue unless bottlenecks on SH-35 were addressed and ongoing infrastructure work was expedited. The report does not specify a formal completion date for the works or announce a new traffic-management measure. For now, parents and school authorities remain dependent on changes to dispersal timings, live bus tracking and individual arrangements to manage the delays.
