All school buses in northwest China's Gansu province will be installed with satellite positioning devices by the end of 2012, authorities with the Gansu provincial supervisory bureau confirmed Friday.

Education, traffic and police authorities in Gansu have jointly initiated a school bus safety management organization in the wake of a deadly school bus crash that claimed 21 lives last November, said Zhou Zhongping, deputy director of the provincial safety supervisory bureau of Gansu.

According to the plan released by the bureau, all school buses are required to have satellite positioning functions installed by the end of this year.

Long distance buses, chartered travel buses and dangerous chemicals loading vehicles should also be equipped with satellite positioning devices.

Gansu will apply digital information management to all of these vehicles.

Twenty-one people, including 19 preschoolers and two adults, died and 43 others were injured on Nov. 16, 2011, when a nine-seat school bus illegally carrying 64 people collided head-on with a coal truck in Yulinzi township, Zhengning county in the city of Qingyang.

In 2011, a total of 1,505 people died from traffic accidents in Gansu, causing. And the death ratio per 10,000 vehicles was twice the national average.