Nandana James BEST is clearly no longer the best. The lifeline of Mumbai, and once considered the most efficient city transport system, is in dire straits.

Salaries do not come on time, the buses are rickety and the constant pressure of traffic has pushed drivers and conductors to the edge. Things reached a head recently when BEST employees went on a nine-day strike in January, paralysing Mumbai. The strike flags issues regarding the way bus services in major cities are run. Some of these concerns are: rising fares; unreliable services; reluctance of the governments to meet losses; the challenge of serving rising populations; and a preference to promote the metro as the main form of mass rapid transport.

Citing a hidden bias against buses, Ashok Datar, economist, transport expert and chairman of the Mumbai Environmental Social Network, observes: “We are worried about giving subsidy to BEST buses but not private cars ( see table on city profiles ). The way they are allowed to use free space in an expensive city like Mumbai is a colossal waste of money,” he says.

Beyond finances

A Review of the Performance of State Road Transport Undertakings (April 2015-March 2016), brought out by the Centre, points out that bus services in metros run at a loss. BEST ran up a net loss of ₹1,061 crore in 2015-16 , Delhi Transport Corporation ₹3,411 crore and Chennai Metro Transport Corporation ₹500 crore that year (accumulated losses are higher in all cases). It is a labour-intensive sector, with staff costs accounting for about half the total cost.

Any mass transport system is supposed to perform the task of carrying millions of passengers efficiently and inexpensively to their workplace and back, to ensure that they are productive agents of the city. It is also expected to reduce both traffic and environmental congestion. To that extent, book losses should be discounted, many economists feel.

Datar is irked by the constant plaint on losses. “The only thing we hear is that BEST is making losses. Public transport systems all over the world, and certainly in Mumbai more so, will be loss-making,” he insists.

Vidyadhar Date, convenor of Aamchi Mumbai Aamchi BEST, an independent forum of citizens for public transport, believes the first step in rebuilding BEST is to ensure that it is subsidised.

Vested interests

But there are other interests at work. Date insists there is pressure from the government and vested interests to cut down bus operations and sell all its land, in the form of depots and the like. “The public has to intervene. The issue is not simply one between workers and management but a much larger struggle,” he says.

“Once, I went to a BEST committee meeting, where I actually heard (in the course of the official meeting itself) some members saying “so next year, will there be no BEST operations” and things like that. So, it’s not a figment of people’s imagination or a conspiracy theory,” says Date.

To drive the point home, Date cites the case of a depot at Mahim in central Mumbai where “huge, luxurious buildings” are coming up.

And even if a truce has been called now and assurances made that BEST will pay the revised salaries, not everyone is upbeat about the road ahead. Ram Chandra, a conductor, is almost certain that the authorities want to sell BEST land. His counterparts, Anil Patil and Ravikant Kumbhar echo this sentiment. “They want to shut BEST buses and opt for privatisation,” they say, implying that jobs will be lost in the process.

Uttam Khobragade, who was General Manager of BEST from 2006 to 2010, also warns against privatisation. “First they (the authorities) make them bleed and then they close them,” he says.

BEST’s fall from grace can be traced back to over a decade earlier when the Electricity Act came into force in 2003. “Until 2004, everything was good because BEST was getting money from the electricity (side). Once that was stopped, the losses started mounting,” says Ravi Raja, a member of the BEST standing committee since 1997.

He pegs the accumulated losses of BEST at ₹2,400 crore in addition to loans of ₹2,000 crore. Of its 439 routes (down from 520 seven years ago) there is just one that is profitable. Things could hopefully change when the merger of the budgets of BMC and BEST happens, and there is more cash in the kitty. This merger of the budgets formed one of the primary demands of the strike.

Shashank Rao, general secretary, BEST Workers’ Union, feels that the BEST committee “has been taking wrong decisions for a very long time.”

Workers’ plight

Meanwhile, Prasad D Funde whose father has been a BEST driver for the past 12 years, says there is hardly any money going around at home. Prasad needs to prepare for the NEET competitive exam but complains that books required for this are very expensive.

Bhagat Singh, a 41-year-old- driver, says his kids are deprived of quality education. Conductor Anil Patil says workers who joined post-2007, barely get around ₹9,000 post various deductions each month.

Meanwhile, even DTC employees are protesting seeking better working conditions and payment for drivers; more DTC (green and red) buses instead of DIMTS (orange) buses, reinstating the contract employees who were terminated for protesting, and making all employees permanent.

Metro vs BRT

There’s also the bigger issue of policy bias towards the metro. According to a report by the Institute for Transportation and Development Policy on the feasibility of building a metro for Coimbatore, “Capital costs vary considerably among MRT technologies, ranging from ₹20 crore per km for BRT to upwards of ₹400 crore for underground metro.” ( see table on relative advantages of city transport systems ). This raises the fares.

Like the ITDP, Sudhir Badami, Civil Engineer and Transportation Analyst, believes that the bus rapid transit (BRT) model, with dedicated bus lanes, is a much better option. “Keeping with what Bogota has achieved almost two decades back, we must put up an inclusive system of four BRT lanes that can carry 50,000 to 55,000 persons per hour per direction (PPHPD). Buses here will operate at a frequency of 20 seconds on arterial routes,” adds Badami.. It was however hastily abandoned as an option in Delhi.

For really large cities, transport systems are struggling with sheer demographics and expanding city areas. This is a larger question of the economic model that drives migration out of rural areas. The transport policy for a large city is just a cog in a larger wheel.

With inputs from Tina Edwin and

Mamuni Das

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