Passenger count dwindling; Bengal buses going off roads

With dwindling passenger count

as a fall-out of the Coronavirus scare, many interstate and intra-state buses in West Bengal have gone off the roads, according to bus owners' associations here on Thursday. Local and city buses are also plying with fewer passengers than usual, leading to huge losses to the owners

of privately-owned buses, Rahul Chatterjee, general secretary of All Bengal Bus Minibus Samannay Samity said.

"Less than 50 per cent of buses are running in different routes - inter-state, intra-state or local," he said.

The situation worsened on Thursday with less number of passengers taking buses compared to earlier days in the week due to the coronavirus scare, Chatterjee told PTI here. West Bengal Transport secretary N S Nigam had earlier said that passengers in state-run buses have also gone down drastically owing to the situation. With only a few buses and fewer passengers, the long- distance bus termini at Esplanade and Babughat wore an almost deserted look on Thursday, as if it was a public holiday.

 

Joint Council of Bus Syndicates general secretary Tapan Banerjee said that operators are finding it difficult to recover fuel cost for running buses. "With educational institutions, several offices and many public places closed owing to the COVID-19 spread in some parts of the country, passenger count has gone down severely and as such, several private buses have been off the roads,"

he said. He, however, hastened to add that owing to social responsibility, public transportation will be continued by the private operators along with the state-run buses. Chatterjee said that with advisories to people to stay at home as much as possible, many drivers and conductors are also not reporting for work. "Many of them have gone home and are not coming for work," he said, expressing fear that the number of buses on the roads will further go down in the coming days. The association secretary claimed that the Sikkim government has stopped entry of public vehicles from other states, thus leading to a number of buses in north Bengal that ply to and from different destinations in the Himalayan state going off the roads. "Buses to and from Odisha and Jharkhand are plying, but there very few passengers," he said. Chatterjee said that the operators of long-distance buses are offering huge discounts on fares to attract

passengers so that the vehicles do not run empty.

He said that both air-conditioned buses and non- airconditioned buses are offering discounts. "The State Transport Authority-fixed rate is Rs 1.20 per kilometre for air-conditioned buses, but now the operators are settling for whatever they are offered by the passengers," he said. He said that despite the discounts, there is only a few passengers. "Owners are incurring huge losses owing to the situation," he said.

Banerjee said that his association distributed hand sanitisers and masks to the drivers and conductors of 200 buses to ensure their safety. "

Since the bus staff operate in close proximity of the public, they need to be extra-cautious," he said.