Eight years after 23 children died at Nurpur, Himachal HC upholds 15-year age cap on school and college buses
A division bench dismissed 21 writ petitions by schools, educational societies and nursing institutes, holding that the State could bar vehicles older than 15 years from student transport under its permit rule-making power without trespassing on the Centre's power to fix a vehicle's life, and that the cap binds every educational institution.
No bus or cab older than 15 years may ferry students for a school or college in Himachal Pradesh. The High Court on 31 October 2026 upheld the rule the State brought in after a school bus plunged into a gorge near Nurpur in April 2018, killing 27 people, 23 of them children.
A division bench of Justice Ajay Mohan Goel and Justice Yogesh Jaswal dismissed 21 writ petitions filed in 2025 and 2026 by schools, educational societies and nursing institutes. Justice Goel wrote the judgment, which is approved for reporting.
The bench held that the age cap falls within the State's power to make rules for permits under Section 96 of the Motor Vehicles Act, 1988. It does not intrude on the Centre's power under Section 59 to fix the life of a motor vehicle, and it is not arbitrary.
The court also settled who the rule binds. A nursing or pharmacy institute cannot escape the cap by saying it is not a school.
The clause and the rule around it
The lead case, treated as such at the parties' request, was filed by Shivalik Institute of Nursing through its president, Khushi Ram Thakur. The other petitioners included public schools, senior secondary schools, educational trusts and a nursing training institute.
All of them challenged Clause (xi) of Rule 73-A(1)A of the Himachal Pradesh Motor Vehicles Rules, 1999. Rule 73-A was inserted by a notification of 12 October 2018. It lists conditions a Regional Transport Authority may write into the permits of buses and vehicles owned by or attached to schools and educational institutions.
Clause (xi) says vehicles providing transport to schools will not be more than 15 years old. The lead petition sought a writ of certiorari quashing it, a mandamus not to apply it to the institute's bus, and records of buses run by government institutions.
The clause sits among 20 general conditions. Others require school buses to be painted dark yellow, carry GPS, and have tamper-proof speed governors set at 40 km per hour. Drivers may not be over 60, and two fire extinguishers are mandatory.
Another condition limits a bus carrying children under 12 to one and a half times its seating capacity. None of these other conditions was separately challenged.
The institutions: fitness, not age
The petitioners hold private service vehicle permits. They said their buses only pick up and drop students and staff over very short distances, and that a well-kept vehicle lasts 20 to 25 years.
Counsel Nitin Thakur argued that only the Union government can fix a vehicle's life under Section 59, so the clause was beyond the State's rule-making power. Age, he said, says nothing about whether a vehicle is roadworthy, and Transport Department officers already certify fitness.
Barring a bus purely on age without checking roadworthiness was, on his argument, arbitrary and hit by Article 14. He also said nursing institutes are not schools, so refusing to renew their permits under Clause (xi) was bad in law.
Counsel Vijender Katoch added that institution buses run only a few kilometres a day, that the State ignored the institutions' business difficulties, and that the cost of new buses would fall on students.
The petitioners also pointed out that children ride to school in government buses, private stage carriages, cars and jeeps that are older than 15 years. The State, they said, could not single out institution buses.
The Section 59 argument
Counsel Shubham Singh Guleria and Vishal Thakur pressed the competence point hardest. Section 96, they said, confers no express power on a State to fix a maximum age for vehicles carrying children, and they relied on the Supreme Court decision in Naresh Chandra Agrawal v. Institute of Chartered Accountants of India, (2024) 13 SCC 241.
Guleria argued that Parliament had dealt with the legal effect of a vehicle's age in Section 59 and vested that power in the Centre. The State's general and residuary power under Section 96(2)(xxxiii) could not be read as an open licence to create an age-based disability with substantially the same effect.
The clause, he said, does not prescribe a safety requirement. It declares a bus unusable for students once it completes 15 years, even while it still holds a valid fitness certificate and permit, which created an anomaly within the Act.
What happened near Nurpur
Advocate General Anup Rattan began with the accident. On 9 April 2018, a 42-seater school bus in Kangra district fell into a 700-foot gorge near Nurpur after school hours. Twenty-seven people died, including 23 children under 12.
The next day a division bench of the High Court treated newspaper reports as a public interest litigation, CWP No. 73 of 2018. Among the questions it put to the State were the age and mechanical condition of the bus, and whether any mechanism existed to supervise school buses run by private schools.
Also on 10 April 2018, the State set up a High Level Committee under the Chief Secretary to recommend school transport safety measures. Draft guidelines went online on 17 April 2018, with comments invited from the public and all stakeholders.
A sub-committee under the Additional Commissioner, Transport, examined the responses. Some objectors had suggested that school vehicles be limited to nine years, or to between 10 and 15 years.
On 5 May 2018 the committee recommended a 15-year limit among other measures. The government then gave the guidelines statutory backing by inserting Rule 73-A. The petitioners did not dispute this account of the process before the bench.
The State: a preventive measure
The Advocate General argued that Himachal is mainly hilly and 15 years is a fair period for a vehicle to carry children. The clause bars only student transport; the vehicle can still be used for anything else the Act permits.
He said older vehicles, even when maintained, are more prone to structural fatigue, material degradation, outdated safety technology and sudden mechanical failure that periodic fitness checks cannot detect. The rule, he added, was part of a road safety policy issued under directions of the Supreme Court-appointed Committee on Road Safety.
Section 2(11) of the Act defines an educational institution bus as one owned by a college, school or other educational institution and used solely to carry its students or staff. The rule applies to all such vehicles, owned or contracted, and to colleges, training centres and vocational institutes alike.
On the claim that the State runs its own old vehicles, he cited a government notification of 7 February 2024. It requires all government vehicles that are condemned or have completed 15 years, whichever is earlier, to be sold by e-auction and scrapped.
He also pointed to other States. Rule 76-B(16) of the Chhattisgarh Motor Vehicles Rules, 1994, added in 2015, bars school bus permits for vehicles over 12 years old. Rule 222-D of the Uttar Pradesh rules and Rule 67A of the Haryana rules set 15 years.
A three-judge bench of the Chhattisgarh High Court, in Ghanshyam Das Rungta Foundation v. Union of India, had answered a reference on that State's 12-year rule. It held nothing in Section 96(2)(xxxiii) bars a State from laying down such a condition.
A vehicle life versus a school-run life
The bench began with Section 59. It lets the Centre specify the life of a motor vehicle, reckoned from manufacture, after which the vehicle is deemed not to comply with the Act or the rules. The Centre may set different ages for different classes of vehicles.
The court said “there is a fallacy in the argument of the petitioners” (para 41). Clause (xi) does not fix the life of a vehicle. It only fixes how long, counted from manufacture, a vehicle may be used to carry students.
Once the Centre fixes a vehicle's life under Section 59, the vehicle cannot be used at all after that period. Clause (xi) creates no such embargo. A bus retired from school duty can be used for any other purpose, so long as its life under Section 59 has not run out.
The bench gave an example. If the Centre fixed a school vehicle's life at 10 years, nobody could use the State rule to run it for 15. If the Centre fixed 20, 25 or 30 years, the vehicle could carry students for only 15, and could then be put to other use.
Whether a vehicle's life should be one year or 40, the bench said, is the Centre's domain, and the State cannot tinker with or supplant it. The State rule must operate within Section 59, and the Centre's power stays untouched.
Section 96 and the permit power
The bench then turned to Chapter V of the Act, which governs the control of transport vehicles. The petitioners' permits were issued under Section 76, which lets a Regional Transport Authority grant a private service vehicle permit and attach conditions, including such other conditions as may be prescribed.
Section 96(1) empowers the State to make rules for carrying Chapter V into effect. Sub-section (2) lists specific subjects, but without prejudice to that general power, and clause (xxxiii) covers any other matter which is to be or may be prescribed.
So the State's rule-making power is not confined to the listed subjects. Since Section 76 is part of Chapter V, the power covers rules for permits under it, including how old a vehicle carrying students may be.
The petitioners' point that Section 96 grants no express power to fix an age did not persuade the bench. The purpose of rules, it said, is to supplement what the main statute does not spell out.
Applying the approach in State of Tamil Nadu v. P. Krishnamurthy, (2006) 4 SCC 517, and Naresh Chandra Agrawal, the bench asked three questions: the source of the power, the meaning of the rule, and whether the rule stays within the power delegated.
The source was Section 96, the rule spelled out permit conditions for institution vehicles, and it was consistent with the delegated power. The 1999 Rules themselves were framed under Section 96 read with Section 212. The rule was therefore within the State's competence and not ultra vires the parent Act.
The bench added that the UP, Haryana and Chhattisgarh rules were framed under the same Section 96(2)(xxxiii), and it relied on the Chhattisgarh three-judge bench ruling that nothing in that provision bars such a condition.
Safety cannot be priced
On the financial burden, the bench held that the safety of school-going children cannot be measured in monetary terms, and that “the safety of the students is paramount” (para 69). Nor would the buses become useless, since the rule does not stop their use for other purposes.
Fifteen years was not arbitrary either. Chhattisgarh had chosen 12, while Uttar Pradesh and Haryana had chosen 15.
That students also travel in older stage carriages did not make the condition on institution buses bad in law. The bench accepted that the cap was a preventive measure meant to stop safety risks before they appear, adopting the State's point on fatigue and hidden mechanical failure.
Given that the State is largely hilly, and that Chhattisgarh had thought 12 years proper, the bench said the institutions should be glad Himachal chose 15. Nothing prevented the State from setting a lower limit.
Roadworthiness, the court held, cannot be the sole criterion for deciding the maximum age of a vehicle that carries students. One fatal accident caused by an old vehicle can shatter families for good, and that loss cannot be compensated.
“The life of the young generation is far more precious” (para 73) than the petitioners' monetary concerns, the bench wrote. Any prudent safety step by the State must be upheld unless it is so arbitrary that it shocks the court's conscience.
A nursing institute is a school here
The last question was whether nursing and pharmacy institutes fall within Clause (xi), which speaks only of schools. The heading of Rule 73-A refers to vehicles owned or attached with a school or educational institution, but Rule 73-A(1) and its clauses use the word school alone.
The bench cited Black's Law Dictionary, which defines a school as an institution or place for instruction or education, and an educational institution as including a school, college or university.
Reading Rule 73-A harmoniously, it held the word school is not confined to institutions teaching up to Class 10 or 10+2. It covers nursing, pharmacy, engineering and medical institutions alike.
The deciding point was that Clause (xi) sits in the same list as Clauses (i) to (x) and (xii) to (xx). The petitioners did not dispute in argument that they must follow those other conditions. An institution bound by the rest of the list cannot claim immunity from Clause (xi).
Order
The bench held that neither the notification of 12 October 2018 nor Rule 73-A was beyond the State's competence, and that Clause (xi) is not arbitrary and does not offend Section 59 or Section 96. All 21 writ petitions were dismissed.
The court declared that Clause (xi) applies to every educational institution to which the general conditions in Rule 73-A(1)A apply. Interim orders were vacated forthwith, pending applications were disposed of, and there was no order as to costs. Judgment had been reserved on 27 October 2026.