A day after a Metro Express bus went missing from the Central Bus Station here, officials of Telangana State Road Transport Corporation are still befuddled and scrambling to put into place a safety mechanism.
While missing buses have been reported in the past, officials said the bus being completely stripped bare for being sold as scrap is perhaps a first. “This is unprecedented. Can a steering be locked with a chain?” a senior official told The Hindu .
Taking this into cognisance, TSRTC on Thursday began to beef up security and is now contemplating identifying and implementing ‘alternative bus locking mechanisms’. The missing bus was from Kushaiguda depot and was plying between ECIL and Gowliguda. It was stolen after driver J Venkatesh, who was on night-out duty, went to sleep at the crew rest room in CBS so that he could get back and report to duty around 5 a.m. on Wednesday.
TSRTC officials on April 24 had confirmed to The Hindu that the bus did not have a key ignition system. Instead, a starter switch is used by drivers.
“The Mark VI buses have key-ignition. The ones before it operate on a starter switch. At this time, it is not possible to make technical modifications to install key-ignition system in these buses. Therefore, we are looking at identifying and installing alternative locking mechanisms for 900 night-out buses,” said Executive Director (GHZ) Vinod Kumar.
Mr Kumar also said that a larger number of private security guards would be deployed at the bus stations whenever drivers on night-out duty park buses. Sources said that the CCTV cameras were removed in last July after the hangar collapse at CBS so as to facilitate debris removal. They were not re-installed. This, they said, is why the alleged thief was not easy to identify.
A similar incident was reported in August 2005 when an RTC bus in the undivided State of Andhra Pradesh went missing from the Mahatma Gandhi Bus Station, which is a stone’s throw from the CBS. The Bus belonged to the Parigi Depot.
While the Metro Express bus stolen from CBS was stripped bare, miscreants who stole the bus from MGBS were able to flee with one of its tyres.
“In the past 20 or 30 years, we must have had about half-a-dozen such cases. But none has been as serious as the one at CBS. As far as I remember, we found the stolen buses intact,” an official said.
