The Greater Hyderabad zone (GHZ) of the Telangana State Road Transport Corporation officially accepted that it lost 10 per cent of its normal revenues - about ₹30 lakh, on Monday, the final day of Ganesh ‘Nimajjan’ (immersion) because its buses are off certain stretches of roads that got choked with people accompanying their respective ‘Ganesha’ idols.
The biggest zone of the corporation that has about 3,800 of the total fleet strength of about 10,500 buses removed 10 per cent of them just for the final immersion day, making the roads that much less congested. It rather gracefully accepts the loss, knowing fully well that that there was no alternative.
When contacted, Executive Director-GHZ, A. Purushotham said, “we do not consider it a loss at all, technically because apart from it being unavoidable, it is a popular holiday. We cut down route lengths and instead ran more ‘singles’ as they are called. Also, we ran about 500 special buses just to ferry passengers from surrounding areas who wanted to see the festival mood at immersion points, primarily Hussainsagar point.”
As for statistics, the GHZ earns an average of ₹3 crore a day, operating about 9.5 lakh route kilometres. “For years now, it has been a pre-planned scaling down of schedules on such days for which we are prepared, so we don’t term it a ‘loss’, he said.
The special buses ran on routes like Khairatabad and Miyapur, Patancheru and Medchal. Regular services like No. 137 between RTC crossroads to Birbanbagh were asked to cut short the normal route, at Himayatnagar and went back, sometimes doing more ‘singles’ or ‘schedules. The same was the case with No. 136 that runs between Osmania University and Birbanbagh.