Bengaluru students lose 600 hours yearly to Sarjapur Road traffic: Report

Bengaluru's traffic crisis costs students hundreds of classroom hours annually, with 35,000-40,000 children stuck in gridlock.

Students in Bengaluru’s tech corridor are paying a steep price for the city’s traffic mess, with thousands losing the equivalent of hundreds of classroom hours each year.

Tens of school buses were caught in the gridlock, leaving children and parents helpless in congestion (X/NammaBalagere)

On the Varthur–Sarjapur Road stretch, where more than 30 private and several government schools are located, an estimated 35,000 to 40,000 children endure daily gridlock. Over 1,300 school buses ply this corridor, and each student spends an average of 180 minutes commuting every day, adding up to nearly 600 hours a year lost in traffic, Times of India reported.

A study by Inventure Academy, which tracked the GPS data of 61 of its buses as part of its campaign “Our Mobility, Our Voice”, revealed that a quarter of students’ lives is being spent on the road.

The data also showed that travel times have worsened in recent years despite occasional improvements. For instance, the return trip to Prestige Falcon City took 130 minutes in 2019, dropped to 108 minutes in 2022-23, but has steadily risen since, reaching 164 minutes in 2025-26, the report further added.

The findings highlight how traffic conditions in Bengaluru’s tech belt are worsening year after year. A separate survey by another private school also confirmed that bus journeys in the current academic year are taking 32% longer than in the last one.

Long queues of school buses sparks outrage

Earlier in August, frustration over the traffic mess spilled onto social media when images of long queues of school buses stranded on Varthur–Sarjapur Road went viral. A widely shared post by community page Namma Balagere on X showed a convoy of yellow buses held up near the Balagere T-Junction. The caption described the chaos as a “4 km-long traffic jam since 7 am” and blamed the area’s broken infrastructure for forcing schoolchildren to spend hours on the road.

Bengaluru Traffic Police responded that the bottleneck was largely the result of ongoing civil works along the Outer Ring Road (ORR) and the heavy volume of vehicles in the corridor.

But for parents and commuters, the explanation did little to ease their anger. Many expressed distress at the daily ordeal schoolchildren face. “It’s heartbreaking to see kids start the day without breakfast, rush to catch their buses, and then sit through hours of gridlock,” one user wrote, pointing to the stretch near Varthur as a daily choke point.

Others questioned the practicality of operating large school buses on narrow roads already clogged with vehicles. “They can barely take U-turns on these crammed stretches. What are the traffic police even doing?” a commuter asked online.