THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: A couple of days after a KURTC low floor bus rammed into a crowd killing two blind cricketers, fingers point at the lack of trained drivers who can operate low-floor buses.
Contrary to the claims by transport officials, it has come out that many drivers lack the mandatory training. Further, the KSRTC website has not published the names of drivers who had undergone training.Many of them drive low-floor buses without any prerequisite training, alleged V V Haridas, state general secretary of the KSRTE welfare association and a driver with the corporation. “We could not find out whether one is trained or not as there are no explicit documents to show it?,” he said. As their names remains hidden from the public attention, they could easily send anybody to run a low floor Volvo, he said. Apart from the lack of training, most drivers do not know how to decipher the messages that appears on the dashboards of their vehicle.
“Everything runs in an automatic mode in the low floor volvo Which requires adequate technical knowledge to understand it. Unfortunately, only those who joined as drivers after 2007 have the adequate educational qualifications who can at least discern the technical details. But the batch of drivers who joined prior to 2007 are literally slow in adapting to the details,” V V Haridas, state general secretary of the association said. “The previous managing director of KSRTC had issued a circular making SSLC the mandatory qualification for a driver. But that was sabotaged,” he said. Besides, many officials in-charge of these buses are highly incompetent that they could not correspond effectively with the Volvo company, he added.Even the vehicle supervisors on condition of anonymity said the fitness of drivers are not checked before they were send to training. “Shockingly, alcoholics were in the team,” they said.
