Hummingbird News Desk
BURDWAN, 7 APRIL: Bus passengers showed up a bizarre example of sharing the pain of the bus owners due to soaring petroleum fuel prices and started offering higher fares in Burdwan sans the state’s injunction about fare hike.
Janakiranjan Sinha, secretary, Burdwan Bus Association, after an extended meeting on hike in fuel prices said: “Almost all of the daily passengers have given up the subsidised fares and have started offering full fares voluntarily. Some passengers are offering additional money to help running the buses as they know well that we’re struggling high at this situation.”
Burdwan East rolls 1500 passenger busses on different routes every day. Sinha said: “Already 400 buses have been halted by the owner owing to huge losses.”
In Bankura, 30 percent buses have stopped rolling today. As stated Dipak Shukul, secretary, Bus & Minibus Welfare Association: “We’re helpless. We can’t afford asking the bus operators to roll buses as in every trip they are incurring cash losses.”
As many as 19 buses have been withdrawn from the services by the selling-agents of state owned South Bengal State Transport Corporation since 5 April. Arun Sannigrahi, president of the agents’ unity said: “The Corporation suddenly has started drawing an increased EPKM (earning per kilometer) from Rs 26 to Rs 31 from us, which we couldn’t afford to adjust and they ordered so without prior intimation.” So, he said: “We’ve suspended services of 19 buses.”
Today, the SBSTC issued similar order for the buses run by the franchisees. The Chairman, SBSTC, Subhas Mondal said: “The EPKM rates of certain buses have been increased as those were offered to the franchisees in much cheaper rates than usual by the former Transport Minister Suvendu Adhikari. Besides, we are investigating many more such discrepancies those were hitting the Corporation’s exchequer badly.”
Tags: #BusOwners #PetrolPriceHike #Passengers #Fare #Burdwan