HYDERABAD: With the Telangana High Court giving a green signal, the State government is expected to issue a notification for permits on 5,100 routes which is 50 per cent of the number of routes that it is operating its buses under Section 102 of the MV Act. Even as the employees are waiting with bated breath to resume duty, the state machinery is understood to be preoccupied with privatisation of the routes.
According to sources, when the offer of the unions to call of the strike came up for discussion with KCR on Thursday, he apparently spent more time discussing privatisation of routes and how the RTC could be pulled out of the morass.
Fate of RTC employees hangs in balance
OF the 5,100 buses whose routes were proposed to be privatised, 3,400 are being operated by private players for a service fee given by the TSRTC. Of these 3,400 buses, 2,100 are already tied up with RTC even before the strike, and the additional 1,300 odd buses were recently given permits and had their tenders finalised on October 26. They are expected to be inducted into the TSRTC, and will be fully operational from January 26 across the State.
These are mostly plying on profitable RTC routes, and not in city or on rural routes. The fate of the other 1,700 buses lies with the transport department and the routes they ply will be decided by the transport commissioner as they will be a separate private operator. Operations in Hyderabad are unlikely to go to private players as they are loss making and getting private drivers in the city could be difficult. With this privatisation rejig, the government will get rid of 2,700-3,000 odd RTC owned buses, which are 15 years and above, and unfit for use.
This will take the number of RTC-owned buses to 5500-5400, which will be the new number of buses in RTC’s control. Experts feel that before privatisation is done as per Section 102 of MV Act, the government ought to invite suggestions from stakeholders concerned, and take their views into consideration before modifying the existing scheme of things. However, the fate of RTC employees seems still uncertain. Presently the bus to employee ratio is 1:5, that is one bus being managed by 5 employees.
“With the rejig, the ratio will be 1:10. No clear picture has emerged on how the RTC will deal with this,” a source in the RTC said. Meanwhile, RTC employees remained worried about their fate. “We have offered to call off the strike provided we are allowed to join without any conditions. However, the government has not responded. We hope they will respond by Saturday, else we will continue our agitation,” Thomas Reddy said.