Passengers relieved as all ST buses start plying

Nagpur: Passengers using State Transport (ST) buses for travelling medium and long distance heaved a sigh of relief on Saturday as all buses plied normally. Bombay high court, on Friday evening, had declared the strike by ST workers as illegal and ordered them to resume duties immediately.

Mor Bhavan and Ganeshpeth bus stations, that wore a deserted look in past few days, saw the usual crowd again. ST users said that they were relieved that the strike was over. The hawkers doing business near these bus stations were also a happy lot as business was back to normal.

Large number of citizens commute to Nagpur from nearby villages and towns for work and education. They were badly hit by the ST strike. During Diwali, most of them had stayed at home but they were slated to begin their routine after the festival of lights. Had ST buses not started plying, city buses and private buses would not have been able to fill in the void.

Many Nagpurians who work in Pune were also worried over the strike. They had come to the city for Diwali and were slated to go back. HC ended the strike just in time for them.

SC Panchbhai, divisional controller of ST, said that all the buses were plying from the city. "About 1,300 buses depart from Nagpur for various destinations. All of them were plying on Saturday. Not a single worker was on strike. The situation had completed returned to normal," he told TOI.

Nagpur Municipal Corporation (NMC) had pressed 85 city buses into service on medium distance routes. City transport manager Shivaji Jagtap said that four or five city buses had plied beyond their normal routes early on Saturday morning. "When we realized that complete normalcy had returned, we ordered our bus operators to ply only on scheduled routes," he said.

ST provides for bus transportation within the entire state. It connects urban areas to rural too and has on offer 18,500 buses which are made available to the public for nearly 18,000 routes which include even the most remotely located tribal and rural areas.

For most villagers, ST is their only mode of transport for long distance travel and during Diwali, people from the city who head to their hometowns in rural parts of the state also depend on these buses. ST also plies air-conditioned buses like Shivneri, which are very popular on the Mumbai-Pune-Mumbai route even among the middle class. ST has 250 depots and workshops and around 609 bus stations throughout the state apart from 4000 road side bus shelters.