About 56% of the air-conditioned BEST buses are off the roads and do not serve commuters, said MNS member Kedar Hombalkar at a committee meeting on Friday.
“Of the 284 AC buses in the fleet, we just have 124 buses plying on the road on various routes,” he said. “The rest are lying idle at the depots … [they are] at least not used for ferrying the daily commuters.”
BEST general manager Jagdish Patil said the AC buses which were not on the road were being put to better use. Hiring out these AC buses was bringing as much as Rs 7,500 for a 12-hour shift.
“We are offering them on hire to the corporate sector, cruise operators, for tourism purposes and for entertainment and amusement parks,” he said. “The contractual rates will fetch us more revenue. We will also be giving out AC buses on hire for ‘Ganapati Darshan’, apart from the regular Mumbai Darshan, for local tourists.”
In the past, close to 20 routes for AC buses were scrapped as these were “loss-making”.
Hombalkar said most AC buses were in a bad condition and should be phased out.
As for the ordinary, non-AC buses, 600 of these were lying idle at depots, said Hombalkar, pointing to monthly statistics.
“If in a fleet of 4,200 buses, you keep 650 off the roads and you can expect a drop in frequency,” he said. “Also, the number of conductors and drivers has gone down by nearly 1,000 in recent months. There are not enough drivers to take buses out of the depots.”
He said the undertaking was taking a hit as the number of passengers was going down drastically. “What was around 41 lakh passengers on an average daily had dropped to 28 lakh per day in June,” he said.
Congress member of the BEST committee Ravi Raja said BEST faced serious competition from share autorickshaws and taxis, and demanded more buses on the road.
“Passengers are shifting to the share autos and taxis and unless we attract more commuters, we will not be able to improve the undertaking’s financial condition,” Raja said. “In the past, you would see 50 to 100 commuters at bus stops from 8 am to 10 am. Now you don’t see such crowds anymore.”