Ahmedabad: Kishore Solanki has changed the school van to become a mobile snack vends in Mengagar where he presents South Indian fees such as Medu Vada and IDLI.
This is the same van where the 51-year-old child is used to pick up children and release him to school before the pandemic.
“I got around Rs 12,000 every month teaching children to school,” Solanki said.
“In pandemic, schools have been online, there is no income at all.
After borrowing money to survive, I decided to switch professions and turn my van into a food connection.
My wife cooked food and I sold it.” For Solanki, the change is not easy Because he had to go without working for six months before he came with an alternative from this livelihood.
With the only class study that was stopped for about one and a half years in the middle of the Covid-19 pandemic and online school, many van school drivers had been given unemployed.
The gloomy business forecast comes from the fact that even though there are open schools for class 8-12, not many students choose schools who go to school physically.
For Ritesh Shah, 42, who lived in the Vejalpur area, only eight months since he bought a new van for school children when the pandemic hit.
“Previously I used to drive a bus.
But the school authority for whom I worked to stop service and encourage me to buy vans.
I started selling milk in my van when schools were closed but I faced financial losses and had to give up,” Shah said.
Today he made a living by selling Puri Puri and produced around Rs 500 per day.
Indravadan Modi, which is a second-generation van school, has a 10-van fleet and employs 11 drivers.
With the school closed, Van collected dust because most of the driver had taken another job to survive.
Modi now market special alkaline water machines.
“The water business makes me float.
I don’t know when the school will be fully reopened,” Modi said.
“My father started the van’s school business in 1983, this was the first time the uncertainty was annoying us.”