The Hindu : New Delhi News : DTC rakes in the moolah as bus crisis continues

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Friday, Jul 27, 2007
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New Delhi

DTC rakes in the moolah as bus crisis continues

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

But its buses run at speeds exceeding 40 km per hour, indicating that all is not well with the speed governors

NEW DELHI: In the hue and cry being made in the Capital about road-worthiness of Blueline buses, a lot of discussion has centred round tampering of speed governors installed in them. But what has been conveniently forgotten is that many of the State-run Delhi Transport Corporation buses also run at speeds exceeding 40 km per hour on the roads, indicating that all is not right with the speed governors installed in them.

But that is not all. The Corporation, which has been in the red for long and has had an abysmal maintenance record, is all set to gain the most from the ongoing bus crisis.

All of a sudden, the DTC appears to have become the blue-eyed boy among bus operators. The Corporation, which had been struggling to even pay salaries to its staff until a year ago, now suddenly finds itself being pampered. “Life has definitely changed for us,” said a senior official, pointing out how 525 new buses are going to be added to the DTC fleet in the five months starting October and how the Board has approved purchase of another 2,000 buses, including 500 air-conditioned ones.

Larger role

A senior official said the DTC is also gearing up for a larger role. “Our fleet size will grow to over 6,000 by 2009 and since we need more drivers we have advertised for 2,500 short-term appointments and have also approached the Delhi Subordinate Service Selection Board to make an equal number of regular appointments for us.”

The official said besides the poor fleet utilisation in the evening due to shortage of drivers, another key area of concern for the DTC was the breakdowns on the roads. “The new buses would definitely help in reducing this figure but we also intend to improve our maintenance.”

As for the financial health of the DTC, the official insisted that the losses are due primarily to the social obligations under which the DTC has to ply buses on non-profitable routes like the villages in the peripheral areas, provide for passes to students and other categories, operate frequent services during non-peak hours and late hours and run services such as U-Specials for students.

To overcome the financial losses, the DTC is now looking at increasing its non-ticket revenue. “We recently gave out the bus queue shelters on build-operate-transfer basis and that fetched us Rs. 2.11 crore. More such ventures are being planned to improve the balance sheet.”

To bring down the accidents involving its buses, the DTC has also decided to independently investigate the cause of every accident so that mistakes are not repeated.

“Anyway our buses are safer as they are only driven by professional drivers and never by helpers or cleaners,” quipped the official.

But while the Corporation at times installs both electronic and mechanical speed governors to abide by court directions on the speed limit, the staff tend to bypass them so that they are able to speed up the bus on the roads as “the speed limit of 40 km per hour is very unreasonable”. Explaining the rationale, another official said: “Imagine having an open road before you during non-rush hour and still not being able to drive slightly faster at, say, 60 km per hour.”

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