Southern States - Tamil Nadu   

Attractive VRS coming for busmen

By Our Special Correspondent

Chennai Jan. 17. With the Tamil Nadu Government planning to privatise bus routes in all districts and downsizing transport undertakings, an "attractive" voluntary retirement package is in the offing.

In a brief chat with mediapersons here, the Transport Minister, R. Viswanathan, said that under the existing scheme, the employees would be entitled to Rs. 9,000 a year for the remaining period of their service if they opted for the golden handshake. However, a high-level committee was working out a new package.

But no final decision had been taken as yet.

The 21 transport undertakings employ over 1.26 lakh staff members and operate over 17,500 buses in the State.

On privatisation of routes, the Minister insisted that private operators would be allowed to run services only on uneconomical routes through an open tender system.

Asked whether they would evince interest in loss-making services, he said that while the State undertakings employed 7.2 staff members per bus, the private operators would run the services with a skeleton staff and make the routes profitable.

The Government planned to privatise only about 25 per cent of the routes in most of the districts, where private operators had been running services for several years now.

Only in Chennai, Kanyakumari and the Nilgiris districts were private operators yet to be permitted.

Besides, the transport undertakings would be amalgamated into seven undertakings within six months and the Centre's nod for the merger process had already been obtained.

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