Conductors enrolled with the Gurugram Metropolitan City Bus Limited (GMCBL) have not received their salaries for two months. While the GMCBL maintains that they have not paid the concessionaire because of a tax issue, conductors said Gurugaman’s financial health was not sound. RTI activists also said that the company was not transparent about its finances.

Conductors said that despite repeated requests to the GMCBL, the GMDA (Gurugram Metropolitan Development Authority) and labour concessionaire Skylark, there is no clarity on when they might get their dues.

Rajneesh, a conductor enrolled with the GMCBL since last September, said, “There are 162 of us who have not yet received our monthly wages for March and April. Per person, this comes to about ₹34,000.”

Multiple conductors who spoke with the Hindustan Times pointed out that this is the second time in less than a year that wages have been delayed with no intimation. Last year, the Hindustan Times had reported that conductors’ salaries for the months of August and September were delayed and finally released in October. At the time, GMCBL depot manager Subash Budania had attributed the non-payment to “irregular paperwork and lack of police verification on part of the conductors”.

A senior official in the GMCBL’s administration, requesting anonymity, attributed this latest delay to a problem with Skylark’s GST compliance. “The concessionaire was yet to pay us GST, hence we did not disburse the required funds,” he said. The official, however, also clarified that the issue was resolved earlier this week.

Ravinder Yadav, Skylark’s general manager in Gurugram, said, “There were some tax issues which held up their salaries, but we will transfer the money in a day or two.”

Conductors, however, believe that the delays in releasing funds was related to the Gurugaman bus service’s financial woes, which have been kept under the wraps by the management.

The aforementioned GMCBL official confirmed that the company was incurring heavy losses on all of its five operational routes. “It costs us about Rs 70 per kilometer to operate the bus, but the revenue per kilometer is only about Rs 23, meaning we are incurring losses of Rs 47 per kilometer,” the official said.

The city bus service currently covers about 15,000km per day on all five routes, resulting in a daily revenue loss of about Rs 7,00,000, he estimated.

According to RTI activist Aseem Takyar, the GMCBL, and its parent company the GMDA, could do better in terms of financial transparency.

“When I filed an RTI in February seeking purchase orders of the buses, I was clearly denied the information. The financial workings of the company, which runs on a public-private-partnerhip (PPP) model, have been plainly kept out of the public domain despite attempts to
get information through the RTI Act. This should not be the case for an essential public service,” Takyar said.

Last month, however, the GMCBL called for an internal audit to quantify its losses and suggest a “recovery process” for the same.

GMCBL chief executive officer Chander Shekhar Khare did not respond to requests for comment.

First Published: May 02, 2019 04:55 IST