Cases have been booked against the managements of 66 private buses for violation of various provisions of the Motor Vehicles Act (MVA) and one bus has been seized for defaulting tax payment in an overnight raid conducted by the Regional Transport Authority (RTA) officials at Aganampudi.
Special drive
Transport Commissioner P. Sitaramanjaneyulu temporarily shuffled the Deputy Transport Commissioners (DTCs) from one district to another and asked them to check for the violations by the contract carriages.
Guntur DTC G.C. Rajaratnam came the city for this purpose, sources in the Transport Department said here on Wednesday.
The raids were conducted by Motor Vehicle Inspectors (MVIs) under the supervision of Mr. Rajaratnam.
In all, 65 buses with ‘contract carrier permits’ were found to be operating as ‘stage carriers’ and they were asked to pay a fine of ₹5,000. One bus, registered in Telangana, which had not paid the State tax was also seized.
Mr. Rajaratnam said that the raids were conducted after the Transport Commissioner had received information that more than one bus was plying with the same registration number. The raids conducted simultaneously in Visakhapatnam, Vijayawada and Anantapur have not found such irregularities. Visakhapatnam DTC S. Venkateswara Rao was deputed to Anantapur for the special raids.
Later in the day, Mr. Rajaratnam and his team inspected automobile showrooms, in response to several complaints that the dealers were manipulating invoicing process, depriving the government of revenue, apart from collection of additional amounts from customers in the name of handling charges and etc.
“However, no violation was found during the inspections. The dealers have been told to display the rate chart for various services and the phone numbers of RTA officials on their premises,” he said.
