Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TSRTC) chairman Somarapu Satyanarayana on Thursday admitted that overloading the corporation’s vehicles with passengers is one of the key reasons for accidents and said that plans are afoot to replace ageing buses in its fleet.
Mr. Satyanarayana was responding to questions at a press conference in Bus Bhavan.
Expressing his disapproval over taking on board a larger number of passengers than the bus’ seating capacity, Mr Satyanarayana said, “Overloading passengers is bad. It is one of the main reasons for accidents.” He pointed out that while private buses have been asked to adhere to seating capacity, the same should apply for TSRTC buses.
The TSRTC chairman, however added that the transport juggernaut which has around 10,500 buses in its fleet, has a very low accident rate of 0.06%.
Taking a question on the general health of TSRTC-run buses, Mr Satyanarayana said that annually around 800 buses need to be replaced with new ones. This, however, is becoming difficult to do on account of budget and other constraints, he added. He said that buses have the capacity to run 15 lakh kilometres but are running around 2.3 times more than their capacity.
Touching upon plans to overhaul TSRTC fleet, Mr Satyanarayana said that plans are afoot to fully phase out old buses. This, he said, would happen within the next eight to 10 months. A new report dealing with old buses and other issues will be submitted. He also said that ‘two or three’ reports are with the state government and these will be acted upon.