Owners of school buses have appealed to chief minister Mamata Banerjee to waive road tax and penalties for delayed payment of the tax for six months to help them tide over the pandemic-induced crisis.

There are around 4,000 school bus operators in Calcutta and its adjoining areas. The buses have been idling since the schools were closed in March last year as a precaution against Covid-19.

On Tuesday, the bus owners submitted a letter to Mamata’s office at her residence in Kalighat requesting the state government to offer a six-month waiver on road tax and the penalties for late payment of the tax.

A similar relief has been offered to operators of private buses and minibuses.

The plea from the school bus operators came a day after Mamata had said that the owners of the buses and minibuses that are still grounded

would not be eligible for the waiver.

“We want to run our buses, but there is no way we can since all the schools are closed. So it would be unfair to treat us the same way as the owners of grounded private buses and minibuses,” said Himadri Ganguly, of the West Bengal Contract Carriage Owners and Operators Association.

“We are ready to increase our fleet strength to carry fewer students in each bus if the state government decides to reopen schools. We have no other sources of income. How do we pay the road tax?”

School bus operators said that while private bus operators had to pay around Rs 1,500 every three months as road tax, they had to pay around Rs 4,000. School buses come under the category of contract carriage — not stage carriage, like private buses and minibuses — and so the owners have to pay a higher road tax.

“If one fails to pay the tax after a grace period of a fortnight, the tax amount gets doubled. After paying salaries to our staff, there is hardly anything left to pay the road tax,” said a school bus operator from south Calcutta.

Last August, the state government had declared a waiver of all taxes and fines on lapsed fitness certificates for bus and minibus owners. The waiver came at a time operators of private buses and minibuses had been reeling from the twin blows of a steep hike in the diesel price and a drop in the passenger count because of the pandemic.

On Tuesday, several school bus owners and operators walked to the chief minister's Kalighat residence from Hazra Park to hand over a letter containing their appeal to her. They were stopped by police on the way. Later, some of the owners visited the chief minister's office at her residence and submitted their letter.