India gets on the bus

The bus operators, mostly PSUs, appear to have succeeded greatly in diverting the focus of the authors to the quality of vehicles from the actual problem, which is their unprofessional and incompetent management of the services. The matter of quality of the buses, particularly in city services, is of far lesser consequence. In fact, a large part of the journey in city buses, particularly during peak hours, is generally covered standing. As compared to that, in the case of long distance travel, where you have to spend hours together, matters like comfort, air-conditioning, ergenomics, etc, play a lot more significant role. The Bangalore MTC is supposedly catering to about 40% odd trips made in the city today, the rest being undertaken by personalised forms of transport, including the auto-rickshaws. And, this 40% is possibly taking up some 5% of the road space, with the rest taking up the remaining 95%, in a most inequitous kind of proportion, leading to the ever increasing clutter on the roads. The situation can change only if a more balanced proportion can be achieved. And, for this to happen, very clearly the people currently using personalised forms of transport have to be made to switch to using buses. There's no other way. And, with a monopoly government operator, which cannot even bother to get its crew to display destination boards properly, this is just not going to happen. Organised sector private players' (and, not the 'Blueline' types) entry into the field has to be facilitated through reframing of the relevant policy. In this context, I may add that my first exposure to the name TVS was as the public bus transport service provider in the city of Maduarai, way back in the 60's. They were forced out of it during Indira Gandhi's regime, and eventually landed up manufacturing mobikes and willy-nilly cluttering up the city roads. Provided they are facilitated, the TVS scions, I am sure, will be more than happy to get back into their original family business. And, public bus transport services is too vital a sector not to have the expertise of the likes of TVS. All this talk about VOLVO's, low-floor buses, truck chassis, etc is just to divert attention from the main issue. Muralidhar Rao