Catch RTA staff instead

The chaos in Delhi's road transport, which is largely privately operated, contrasts sharply with the efficiency with which the publicly-owned metro rail is being run. Had the latter not been there, the sudden extraction of about 4,000 private buses from the city's roads would have brought the city to a complete standstill. There may even have been some rioting.

The Delhi government has sought to blame the operators of these "Blue Line" buses""so-called because they were originally painted blue, to set them apart from the green-and-yellow buses of the state-owned Delhi Transport Corporation""for not observing safety norms. The truth, as everyone in the capital knows, is that corruption in the police and the road transport authority is so great that virtually no law or rule is enforced. The police are on a hafta system that amounts, it would seem, to as much as Rs 1,000 per day per bus. The RTA officials have their own rackets.

The pool from which the drivers are drawn comprises semi-literate youngsters. Their lack of experience enables bus owners to keep wages down to Rs 300 per day or less, for a murderous 12-14 hour shift in Delhi's hostile weather and difficult traffic conditions. Nor do these buses (built on truck chassis!) have power steering. Long hours and physical strain are the reasons why someone else ends up driving the bus while the designated driver takes a nap. Meanwhile, the need to earn ticket revenue leads to bus races on the road, which the police do little to prevent because they have been paid off. The point ought to be clear: if anyone is to blame, it is the Delhi government. Try as it will, it cannot pass the buck to the owners beyond a point""even though many of them are politicians and policemen. If corruption is the root problem, how about charge-sheeting all the people in the RTA who were responsible for vetting the Blue Line buses, and who either did not do any checking or gave bogus certificates of roadworthiness? That might mean more to the hapless Delhi commuter than all the drama over buses being ordered off the roads.

This episode could resurrect the old debate about whether urban transport should be privately- or publicly- owned. Public bus systems run fairly efficiently in some other cities, and some of them are even profitable while DTC uses money meant for buying new buses to pay staff salaries. The Blue Line menace was born precisely because DTC was not being run properly, despite its conversion decades ago from a departmental "undertaking" to an autonomous "corporation". If it has proved beyond the government's capacity to fix DTC, it has also proved beyond its capacity to keep a check on private buses. The central issue in both cases is the failure of governance, and the Delhi chief minister's offer to walk to work is to turn this scandal into a cruel joke.