LAHORE – A traffic mess was seen outside all major Matriculation examinations centres on Monday, as candidates were seen gathering outside the centres before and after the examinations. Both students and commuters witnessed long queues of vehicles, as candidates reached the centres to give the English paper. Parents, who came to pick and drop their children, expressed concerns over the traffic mess. “Everything is so badly managed by the Lahore Board, how could one expect that they would also think about the traffic issue”, Qasim, a father of two, said.
While pointing out the loopholes, he said that it was up to the board managers to coordinate with the traffic police to avoid such a mess. According to the Board of Intermediate and Secondary Education (BISE) spokesman, 359 centres have been established in which 0.46 million students would appear in various papers. Major examination centres included the centre near the BISE Lahore Office, the Punjab University (PU) Examination Centre and other colleges.
Both the Lawrence Road centre and the PU centre remain choked during exam timings. Talking to Pakistan Today, the Lahore chief traffic officer (CTO) said that it was complicated to manage more than 2,000 candidates at a time. He said that traffic police could not deploy wardens at all examination centres and traffic gets messed up due to low capacity of roads. The CTO said that small roads and no parking space adds to the problems. “But we have tried to smoothen the traffic flow despite immense traffic”, he added.
