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Missing the Bus

It is a fact well known to people around me how much I love public transport. Maybe its the upbringing in Kolkata with a tinge of frugality or maybe its just environmentalism. But I love taking public transport where ever I go here at home or abroad or even in place which are almost foreign in my own country. The best part is I am now getting to work to help improve it in a state.
While I deal with lot of facts and figures everyday. There are some instances which go beyond those to highlight the things which many big data sets fail to high light sometimes. And therefore I am going to limit this post to just few observations and not burden with facts and figures.
Last evening not so usually I was coming back from AP Secretariat to my friend’s place in Gachibowli riding the Bus No. 216. Mid journey I got a window seat even though I have traveled on this route for last two years, so many times I cannot resist looking out of the window for these are just few day I have in this city. After being requested by a co-passenger to pull back the window I pulled it back and was taking out my phone when one of the two windows almost fell on my head. My quick reflexes did save me from atleast an minor accident. But it reminded me of the different time I saw something similar happening before. The one which I remember the most was while traveling to Tuljapur from Osmanbad (both in Maharashtra) in a MSRTC bus when a whole seat just came out. Off-course there were plenty of similar instances where the bus seemed to fall apart anything. I could just have to rely on the forces beyond to guarantee my safe passage. But the good thing is atleast there is organised bus services to when very remote habitations in this part of this world. There are parts of my country not much unknown to me where even this is nothing short of dream. Yet when we talk of public transport improvement the first thing in our mind is metro snaking fast through the elevated corridors high above traffic jams down on the ground. But we so often forget the rickety buses plying on our roads of cities and villages. While most of them do not look swanky they provide very important transit service to a large population of our country. To take figures of recent NSSO survey into account 66% and 62% of household in rural and urban respectively spend on buses. Yet we continue to ignore them while we build metros in cities which do not even have basic public transport to supplement the metros. Thus reducing the efficiency of metros. I am not advocating for only buses and I am not anti metro. Rather being a rail fan I would love to cruise along any new shiny piece of railway line. But the only problem with railways is, it is costly both to build, operate and maintain. And there have been cases where to break even metros have to charge fares high enough that it looses economic feasibility for the commuters. In short a metro corridor costs atleast 10 times more than a BRTS corridor to construct. So at the price of 10km of metro line our cities can build 100kms of BRTS lines. Isn’t that great?
It is therefore high time we scratch our heads a little and just before buying any expensive good in our house we look for its financial viability, we do the same for these major investments in our cities from our hard earned money. And ask our policy makers to give quality public transport which is cost effective and reliable.
To end this journey, I somehow reached my destination before the rest of the bus could fall apart. But I wonder how long will it take us to fix this system which is rapidly falling away. Will we as a nation will reach our next destination of behind a developed urbanized nation riding on these falling apart tin boxes we call public buses?


P.S. After cajoled by a classmate and juniour for so long, what I could not was made possible by a falling window. But thank you Prakash and Devna for pushing me to start writing again, something almost meaningful.
Location: P Janardhan Reddy Nagar, Gachibowli, Hyderabad, Telangana, India

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