The MTC that operates the city's bus fleet is headed for a split. According to a proposal forwarded by the MTC to the Transport Department, the corporation will soon be divided into MTC-I (South) and MTC-II (North).
The proposal follows an announcement about the possibility of a split by the Transport Minister during last year's legislative session.
The dividing line between the two ‘districts' would be Poonamallee High Road and the existing headquarters at Pallavan House would serve as the headquarters for the south zone.
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The increase in volume of operations has made management duties difficult, said an MTC official. “There are about 25,000 employees working for the corporation currently. Supervision has become exceedingly difficult.” He added that the rate of growth of the city has been rapid and MTC services have extended up to Chengalpattu and Mamallapuram. The experiment was tried earlier, but it failed and was followed by a merger.
The Pallavan Transport Corporation, MTC's earlier name, bifurcated in January 1994 to create Dr. Ambedkar Transport Corporation , with a view to improving administration.What ensued was turf war between the two transport ‘districts,' say MTC officials, who were part of the set up then. Revenue sharing became a problem and unhealthy competition between the two divisions resulted in revenue generating routes being served by too many buses while the other routes were ignored. The demerger and creation of the MTC came into effect on January 10, 2001. To avoid the same problems, the proposal suggests measures such as the consent of a joint committee to add extra routes, sharing revenue from season tickets on a pro-rata (based on fleet proportion) basis and adopting the model used for inter-State transit for sharing services (plying equal number of km).