Straphangers United

Chennai’s Metropolitan Transport Corporation seems to have got this one right, at least in the concept. It is not clear whether the service is experimental, but route 29C now has a limited number of Volvo buses operating on it. Covering Besant Nagar to Perambur, this is a route that cuts through the heart of the Central district, the kind of dense places that people travel to, South to North, passing through the Central belly, including Mylapore and Nungambakkam.

No wonder this operates full. It was a boon during the rains as commuters had a comfortable and quiet ride in the thick of fuming traffic all around. We disagree with the tariff of the Volvo service,

Contrast this with the long distance Volvo services that MTC has been operating, connecting Airport and Central Railway Station, Broadway and Guduvanchery and so on. These are no doubt useful, but the trips are more in the core of the city, in the shopping and business areas, colleges, schools and residential districts.

Some of the routes that lend themselves ideally to Volvo service are the traditional favourites: No. 18, from Parrys to Saidapet, No. 11 from T.Nagar to Parrys, No. 10 T.Nagar to Parrys via Egmore and No. 25, Triplicane to Vadapalani covering all of Arcot Road.

It is not as if MTC is unaware of these routes, or the reliability with which they operated in the era before liberalisation. Quite obviously, other considerations have weighed in favour of removing these services, giving an advantage to politically-connected autorickshaw operators.

Yet, the No. 29C service is a harbinger of hope that MTC still has some lingering sense of commuter demands. Hopefully, it will extend this logic to the routes that we have suggested. If it does not, we can only conclude that the autorickshaw mafia of Chennai has close links going beyond the political establishment. And we will have to fight to get proper transport regulation in place in Chennai.

On a trip to Kasturba Nagar earlier this evening on the Beach – Velachery MRTS, the most noticeable thing in the stations on the route was the missing time-tables. As each month goes on, and more commuters want to take the train, the system seems to be regressing.

Sunset view on Tuesday, from the window of a Velachery-bound MRTS train

The stations were all dark and gloomy, and the Kasturba Nagar station was completely dark at 6.30 p.m. Was it a result of the compulsory power shutdown of the DMK Government? Is it not possible to use a few solar panels, positioned securely, to power some lamps in the station?

For all the noises that they make, the UPA-DMK combine has done next to nothing for the Chennai commuter. And the DMK appears to be poised, in spite of communal trouble being stoked by the sangh parivar all around the country, to be routed in the next Lok Sabha election, if it continues with its present ways.

The downturn in the fortunes of the DMK is not something that only political columnists are writing about. Electricity Minister Arcot Veerasamy has expressed fears that if there is a debacle, he will be blamed.

Mr. Karunanidhi could also factor in a lot of urban resentment about commuters feeling abandoned by his Government. The biting inflation is made even more painful by the cost of travel in Chennai; the tacit encouragement given to autorickshaws to operate beyond the pale of law and regulation only adds to the sense of alienation not just for the middle classes, but also for the rising newly-employed population. The DMK has a lot of thinking to do, considering that Chennai is no longer the DMK bastion of old, when encouragement given to lumpen politics ensured electoral gains. Today’s governments are expected to deliver. And the DMK has little to show for its performance in urban transport. 

But then, for the commuter, neither the DMK nor the AIADMK is a useful choice, when it comes to transport policy. That is the rot that the city experiences.

The Metropolitan Transport Corporation (MTC) in Chennai is not known to be a transparent organisation in the best of times. As the monopoly bus operator in this big international city of about 6 million people, MTC remains an unprofessionally managed and functionally anachronistic agency, which cannot deliver the goods for 21st century transport needs.

Held together by plastic rope - a route E18 MTC service on Anna Salai

This picture taken of one of the new buses operated as an “Express” service by MTC on route number E18 (Guduvanchery – Broadway) is a good example of the tattered state of the operator’s management. It shows one part of the bus being held together by plastic rope, fortifying the image that the existing management framework for this bus corporation cannot rise beyond rickety structures.

Despite such a poor showing, India’s Ministry of Urban Development continues to avoid stronger oversight of the DMK Government’s use of funds under schemes such as Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission.

Is the MTC being unfairly criticised after all the talk about its amazing expansion over the past two years? The answer to this question lies not in the claims made by the monopoly, and certainly not in the public relations pictures that are regularly published by newspapers. 

It lies deep in the innards of the website operated by MTC at www.mtcbus.org. In a clever strategy, the MTC has been tom-toming the induction of new buses since the DMK Government came to power. It is indeed true that after the haemorrhage caused by the AIADMK’s policies under Ms.Jayalalitha, public transport suffered incalculably. But there is not much glory for the DMK, if its performance is put under the lens.

Perhaps the most damning statistic is that of the number of services operated. While Mr. Karunanidhi’s government unhesitatingly and shamelessly pats itself on the back about the number of buses launched, it does not explain why the net service increase was only about 175 over the previous year (see table, from MTC website). 

Also giving away the game is the narrow increase in the service augmentation despite a supposedly huge augmentation of fleet. While the claim is that 1139 new buses have been put on the road in 2007-08, which represents about 40 per cent of then existing strength, the number of services rose only by 175. 

Absenteeism, which is a major factor in bus operations, has been on the rise in the last five years in MTC, for whatever reason. We assume that the MTC is not a political organisation, and hence the vagaries of politics should not affect it. Or should we imagine that absenteeism will rise during DMK rule, because the crew feel more comfortable to absent themselves? To substantiate, the absenteeism rate was 5.93 in 2002-03, while in 2007-08, it has risen to 8.23. This is only marginally lower than the previous year’s figure of 8.32. The accident rate for MTC buses per lakh kilometres has also been rising, from 1.33 five years ago, to 1.73 now. If MTC is going to blame the state of Chennai traffic for this, we have no choice but to bounce the ball back : if the bus services had kept pace in reliability, comfort, efficiency and customer-friendliness with the changing travel market, there would have been less of personal vehicle use. 

All this brings us back to the central theme of modernisation of the MTC, which is long overdue. We have been demanding that the UPA Government walk its talk about the National Urban Transport Policy and compel its recalcitrant ally in Tamil Nadu to change its ways. It is our view that the days of using transport corporations for unionised mobilisation of cadres for political activity are long gone. Today what the city needs is a good transport backbone, and there is no easier way to put that in place than with a working bus system, one that is truly commuter-friendly.

We need travel as you please passes that are sold across the counter all through the month, every day, and not at the whim of MTC bureaucrats. We need MTC to stop packing its buses with commuters in its greed to produce a better balance sheet. This will also avoid innocent commuters who are unable to buy tickets in overloaded buses from facing fines and boorish, foul-mouthed and sometimes violent checking staff of MTC .