The Hindu : Transporters find faults with draft time-table

Online edition of India's National Newspaper
Thursday, Oct 10, 2002

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Transporters find faults with draft time-table

By Our Staff Reporter

NEW DELHI OCT. 9. Contrary to what the Delhi Government's Transport Department would have liked, the response of the transporters to the "draft unified time table'' which was released by the Transport Minister, Ajay Maken, on September 16 has been far from satisfactory. More so, as many transporters are still not clear about the plan and others are afraid that it would eat into their profits.

The voluminous draft has been placed in the office of the State Transport Authority for perusal and objections have been invited from the transporters. This process, which began on September 30, will continue up to October 13.

And as the vice-president of Delhi STA Bus Operators Federation, Satbir Sehrawat, said, "a large number of objections are being filed because the rationalisation of the routes has been done without consultation with the operators and a lot of scope has been created for corruption in the scheme through the provision of using surplus staff of Delhi Transport Corporation for acting as time-keepers.''

Representing an association that runs about 5,000 buses in Delhi, Mr Sehrawat said there are several inherent faults in the time-table. For one, it does not take into account the place where the bus operators reside. "My buses run between Sultanpuri in North West Delhi and New Seemapuri in North East Delhi. But while they park near my place of residence in North West Delhi, for some inexplicable reason they are supposed to start their journey from Seemapuri instead of Sultanpuri. And this would entail a lot of dead mileage as the last trip then would also end in North East Delhi and they will have to return empty as well''.

Another point of concern for the transporters is the provision for time-keepers. The Minister had announced that surplus staff of DTC would be deployed for the job at various points along the route, especially at main bus terminals and stops, to keep a close watch on the timing of the buses and their adherence to the routes.

Since the DTC staff would act as time keepers and submit a regular report on violations indulged in by the various bus operators, leading to issuance of challans to the offenders, the transporters believe this would put enormous powers on the hands of the time-keepers and encourage corruption.

But while some of the concerns of the transporters appear genuine, they also appear to be under some illusion about the scheme. Due to some communication gap, Mr Sehrawat believes that the plying of buses has been planned in such a way that 2,000-odd DTC and 5,000-odd private buses will be allowed to ply separately every hour, giving undue advantage of profits to the Government controlled agency. Though in reality, after every few private buses, a DTC bus would be running on all routes.

The Delhi Bus Operators Union president, Amarjeet Singh Sehgal, said since the transporters have not even been provided copies of the draft proposal for the routes on which they were already plying their buses, they were left with little option but to got to the STA office to have a look at the scheme. Interestingly, the draft time-table has not taken into account the inauguration of the Shahdara-Tis Hazari section of Delhi Metro from December which would take away a lot of passengers.

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