Whose bus is this anyway?

Thanks to the increasing popularity and convenience of booking tickets online, we notice more number of people preferring to buy tickets in private buses than state road transport buses.

Options on private buses are many in terms of comfort, compared to the state run buses, except for some innovative transport corporations like KSRTC (Karnataka). They pick you at many points, they drop you at many points and staff are generally courteous except during holiday season.

First question that comes to the mind is why these buses are not treated like regular stage carriages and brought under the rules of stage carriages, so that the passenger safety is given a bigger seat. In the light of Hyderabad - Shirdi bus accident and the recent Bangalore- Hyderabad bus inferno issue, we notice that RTA authorities carrying out major checks and even media going about calling the operators as 'Transport Mafia'. These acts do not give solace to the dead peoples families nor prevent future accidents.

When the tickets are sold online clearly stating that the bus is a stage carriage, then what prevents the RTA to treat them accordingly.

Few points that could be considered for action:

1. Providing space for private bus operators to operate their buses in a regulated manner, instead of these buses starting from where ever they wish. Many a country private n public transport shares the same bus stands.
2. Ticket pricing needs to be monitored particularly during the festive rush when the operators fleece people. In the recent times in AP, when RTC employees went on strike seeking to keep the state united, the private operators had a field day, jacking up the fares.
3. Delivery of promised comfort: passengers are sold tickets but provided with alternate accommodation or less than what has been promised and refunds are arbitrary too.
4. All transport corporations both private and public should be asked to submit a passenger manifest to the RTA online and any tickets that are issued to passengers post departure from the main place should be issued through handheld machines which should be GPS connected to ensure info is shared with the operator and the RTA. This would help to have a track on the actual number of passengers on board, to remove any uncertainties. (There was a speculation on how many passengers were actually traveling in the ill fated Jabbar travels bus, which got burnt on the eve of Diwali)
5. Once these buses come under stage carriage act, they could be regulated in terms of number per route, timing of departure, pricing of tickets etc

In the recent instance of Bus inferno the owner of the bus says he has leased the bus to another operator just after 5 days of purchase (???), hence he is not liable, till date no statement has come from the operator who organised the trip. But lives were lost and nothing can give solace to the families of those who perished in this inferno.

What is most significant is more than 100 buses were seized after the incident in AP alone, no details of what violations these buses were seized for, what happened to these buses after that. Probably we need to make an RTI application to elicit the info. Why the info cannot be posted on the web as to why a bus has been seized and on what circumstances it has been released.

It may be true, we the passengers do not show enough interest to know, whether the bus in which we are traveling does have a permit and is actually allowed to ferry us across to our respective destinations. A simple information board should be displayed in every bus in the form of a sticker pasted on one corner of the windshield, which will tell us, what kind of permit, who is the owner of the bus (even taxis are asked to carry the details on the body of the car), contact nos, Route on which the bus is allowed to ferry passengers. No of passengers the bus is allowed to carry.

Obviously nothing of this sort would be done since there is enough moola to be made by everyone in the game. Bus Registration nos are rented (multiple buses will operate with the same registration number, probably in different routes, one permit/tax for multiple routes), Luggage is carried in violation of the passenger carriage rules, Capacity violations, speed violations etc.

So MVI to Road Transport Commissioner, of course the Minister will all be the beneficiaries in this ring and no state probably would be an exception. When the entire system is in the ring, why should they spoil it for themselves.

Except for some noise made by the union leaders of the transport corporations (who in turn are silenced by sharing the spoils) no concrete effort is made to stop the menace, since the fourth estate too is now a days as corrupt as the other three estates, we the people get nothing but couple of days of noise till the next accident.