Until a decade and half ago, most of the “retired” buses that are operated by the Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) were auctioned at the MTC Central Workshop in Chrompet, located on Chennai’s southern outskirts. These are buses that would have been certified unfit for use anymore.
Most of these abandoned government buses were brought by educational institutions — schools and colleges, mainly for the vehicle’s chassis to re-use them. At that time, except for government agencies engaged in the transport space, any entity, including educational institutions were not allowed to procure chassis on their own at that time.
There have been some changes in the rules over the years, with the result that MTC is now putting its retired buses to another use: Some working spare parts including tyres, wheels and frame are removed to have them refitted in existing buses that may need require spare-part replacements.
"As induction of new buses into a running fleet has been low due to funds-crunch for many years, we reuse working spare parts of abandoned buses to ensure that we run the existing fleet of buses,” says an MTC official.
On an average, MTC officials say, the lifespan of an MTC bus is around six years, however this number varies depending on its usage, such as the distance it has been covering on a daily basis. Another criteria to classify abandoned buses is the number of total kilometres run by the buses. On an average, buses that are operated more than five lakh kilometres are fit to be abandoned.
However, MTC officials say that the area of operations matters. It may be counter-intuitive, but buses that are operated on longer distance, and outside the core city areas, have a longer life than those buses that are operated within city limits.
Replacement of spare parts are mainly done for buses that are operated within the main parts of city as the spare parts of these buses get damaged often due to slow movement of traffic on city roads.
On the status of air-conditioned Volvo buses that were operated mostly on OMR, MTC officials say that all buses were auctioned a few years due to the expiry of their usage period.
