Future of city buses hangs in balance

BATHINDA: The future of city buses is in dark as on the one hand, officials of the Pepsu Roadways Transport Corporation (PRTC) have expressed their unwillingness to operate these buses and on the other hand, private transporters have shown no interest in plying these buses on contract.

Sukhmeet Bhasin

Tribune News Service

Bathinda, September 25

The future of city buses is in dark as on the one hand, officials of the Pepsu Roadways Transport Corporation (PRTC) have expressed their unwillingness to operate these buses and on the other hand, private transporters have shown no interest in plying these buses on contract.

PRTC officials have written many demi official letters to the Municipal Corporation Bathinda (MCB) asking the civic body to take the responsibility of operating the city buses.

However, the MCB has not taken up the responsibility as it has not found any contractor to operate these buses.

A senior PRTC official, on condition of anonymity, said a meeting of PRTC officials and MCB commissioner was held in which a memorandum of understanding (MoU) was signed between both parties regarding the transferring of city buses in the name of the MCB.

He said many letters had been written to the MCB but the civic body was not taking back the job of operating the buses as it had failed to get any contractor who can undertake the project.

In the past four years, the PRTC has suffered a loss of Rs 90 lakh. To recover the loss, the PRTC has extended the route but there has not been any improvement due to which, earlier this year, the PRTC asked the MCB to run the city buses.

The MCB thrice floated a tender for operating the city buses but no private transporter showed any interest in this project.

It is learnt that the reason behind the failure of this tender is the terms and conditions laid by the MCB.

The civic body has made it mandatory for the contractor to build a workshop for parking the buses.

The second reason is that the routes are short and rush of passengers is less.

Now, the MCB has started preparing a new scheme for the city buses to attract private transporters for the job.

Mayor Balwant Rai Nath said, “We are working on the new scheme for running the city buses and very soon it will be finalised. We will float the tender again in the coming days.”