A section of the transport department officials blamed the government for the lack of enough buses in the city a day after the chief minister slammed the department for not doing enough to boost public transport.
The Bengal government’s refusal to revise fares has resulted in state bus corporations struggling to foot the fuel bills, they said.
Over the years, the buses have become old and rickety and, even if some buses are road-worthy, they said there aren’t enough drivers and conductors to run them.
The result: Calcuttans are forced to wait for buses and the state-run transport service vanishes altogether after 10pm.
Chief minister Mamata Banerjee had on Thursday expressed unhappiness over the lack of buses and said the transport department had turned “silent”.
“Many people wait on the roads (for buses). I get to see it frequently,” Mamata had said while addressing a review meeting at Nabanna with her cabinet colleagues and senior bureaucrats.
“Transport department silent department hoye gyachhey (transport department has become silent),” she had said.
Senior transport department officials said the cost of diesel had gone up by over 40 per cent since 2018, when the fares were last revised.
The Calcutta State Transport Corporation (CSTC), which provides the biggest fleet of government buses in the city, has an outstanding due of around ₹4 crore on diesel, the Calcutta Tramways Company (CTC) close to ₹2.5 crore and the West Bengal State Transport Corporation (WBTC) ₹55 lakh, sources
said.
The corporations that operate government buses have to foot their fuel bills. The outstanding amounts have been accumulating for six months, an official said, and the daily ticket sales are not enough to clear the dues.
“The last fortnight of December, when the footfall on the roads was comparatively higher, none of the state bus corporations earned enough to equal the expenditure on fuel. The gap between the CSTC’s fuel expenditure and earnings from ticket sales during this period was above ₹8 lakh,” a senior transport department official said.
“Diesel price in January 2018 was around ₹66 a litre. Seven years on, it is almost ₹92 a litre. Even the maintenance cost has gone up by almost 22 per cent.”
Regulars on the city’s roads said government buses were too few and waiting for them meant embracing uncertainty. At night, such buses disappear by 9pm, several commuters said.
“State buses used to be the most dependable mode of transportation at night. Buses would arrive at the scheduled time and the late-night bus service was the only hope for hundreds of commuters,” said Rajiv Mukherjee, a private bank employee.
“That is all gone now. No one knows where the buses have gone.”
The Mamata government has been rigid about raising fares, fearing a popular backlash. What it has meant is that transportation has become an unviable business and private operators have fled as well.
The Bengal government bought its biggest fleet of buses in 2014-15 — 632 low-floor, low-emission ones.
Senior officials involved in maintaining the buses said most of them have an average mileage of around 1.5-2km per litre. Some of them have to undergo overhauling for weeks and the ones that are fit to run don’t have enough drivers and conductors.
“Before the Covid pandemic, the state cabinet had cleared a proposal of recruiting over 700 drivers and conductors on contract. An austerity drive later led to the plan being shelved. Five years on, no recruitments have been made,” the official said.
“The average age of permanent drivers is around 56 years. So unless there is adequate manpower, it will get difficult to operate buses even if new ones are procured.”