Every morning and afternoon outside dozens of Chandigarh’s private schools, the same scene plays out: cars double-parked on arterial roads, children weaving through moving traffic to reach their buses or parents, school gates choked, and harried guards struggling to impose order on what is, by any measure, a daily safety emergency.The Chandigarh Administration has now formally documented what residents have long complained about — and named names. Several prominent city schools have been caught on official site-plan comparisons having converted their sanctioned parking areas into playgrounds, tennis courts, a swimming pool, guard rooms and sheds — spaces that were never theirs to repurpose.The reckoning is coming when schools reopen after summer vacations. The Estate Office will arrive with sanctioned building plans in hand, compare them against ground reality, and initiate punitive action against every school found wanting. No further notice will be given.Why it mattersChandigarh has 83 private unaided recognised schools — 20 minority-run and 63 non-minority. Every single one of them was allotted government land at concessional rates, well below market value, under the Capital of Punjab (Development and Regulation) Act, 1952. That concessional allotment came with binding conditions: the land was for education and charitable purpose, the layout had to follow a sanctioned building plan, and 15 per cent of seats had to be reserved free of cost for economically weaker section (EWS) students.Over the years, many schools quietly began eating into their sanctioned parking areas — converting them, without obtaining revised building plans, into revenue-generating or prestige-enhancing facilities: sports courts, swimming pools, additional classrooms, lawns, even guard rooms. The parking simply disappeared from the campus.The consequence was predictable. With no internal holding space, buses and private vehicles spilled onto public roads. Parents were forced to stop on carriageways. Children, some as young as four or five, had to navigate live traffic to reach their vehicles. The Chandigarh Administration’s own presentation this week described the resulting chain with clinical precision: sanctioned parking removed, no internal vehicle holding area left, parents stop on public road, children board and deboard on public road, and increased accident risk.That chain, played out daily across the city’s school zones, is what STRAPS was designed to break.Who is affectedThe immediate stakeholders run into lakhs. Chandigarh’s 83 private schools together enrol hundreds of thousands of students. Their parents — many of them working professionals who depend on a predictable, safe pick-up and drop-off routine — are directly affected by whether a school has functional internal parking or not.School staffers, particularly those deployed at gates and in school buses, will face new mandatory obligations: supervised boarding and deboarding inside premises, traffic regulation duty during opening and closing hours, and one-way circulation enforcement. Non-compliance by a staffer is, ultimately, non-compliance by the school.School managements and owners face the sharpest exposure. Where parking areas have been physically altered — walls built, courts laid, pools dug — the restoration cost and legal liability could be substantial. Deputy Commissioner Nishant Kumar Yadav, who is also the UT Estate Officer, has made it clear that unauthorised construction or deviation from sanctioned building plans will attract action under applicable laws. For schools holding government land on concessional leases, that is not a trivial threat.How the policy worksSafe Transportation Policy for Students (STRAPS) is the Chandigarh Administration’s comprehensive framework for student safety in transit. Its core requirements, now being enforced with new urgency, include:All boarding and deboarding of students must take place on the school premises, not on public roads, under supervision of trained staff.Schools must maintain an internal holding area with adequate capacity for buses and private vehicles during peak hours.Staggered pick-up and drop-off timings may be explored to reduce simultaneous vehicle load.Separate entry and exit points must be maintained for vehicle circulation to prevent gridlock inside campuses.One-way traffic management must be enforced around school gates during opening and closing hours, so that students are never required to cross roads.Schools must deploy their own manpower — not rely on police or civic staff — to regulate traffic in their immediate vicinity.The policy’s requirements are not new. What is new is the administration’s decision to enforce them through the Estate Office’s sanctioned-plan verification mechanism, which gives officials the legal basis to act against schools that have physically altered their layouts — rather than merely issue advisories.What nextThe summer vacation window is, effectively, the last grace period. Schools have been directed to acknowledge Tuesday’s directions in writing and use the break to physically restore all parking violations — demolishing unauthorised constructions, clearing encroachments, and reinstating the spaces shown in their sanctioned building plans.When schools reopen, Estate Office teams will conduct site inspections, plans in hand. Any school found in violation will face punitive action without further notice — a phrase the administration has now used in two successive formal communications, signalling that the standard cycle of notices and extensions is over.Separately, the EWS compliance audit ordered on April 28 — requiring the Estate Office to verify that all 83 schools are honouring their lease obligation to admit 15 per cent of students free of cost — remains live. The UT Administration had ruled last year that this obligation is not merely contractual but constitutional, binding under Articles 21A, 41, 45 and 46, on minority and non-minority schools alike.For parents, the practical implication is straightforward: when schools reopen, the roadside chaos that has passed for normal outside many city schools should, if enforcement holds, begin to change. For school managements that have spent years treating their sanctioned parking as discretionary space, the summer of 2026 may prove to be an expensive reckoning.