Leaders of Andhra Pradesh Public Transport Department (AP PTD-formerly APSRTC) Employees’ Union have slammed the RTC management for what they call “depriving the common man of the public transport facility in a systematic way on the pretext of declining occupancy ratio (OR) in its fleet of buses.”
In a letter addressed to the Commissioner and Managing Director, AP PTD, the union’s State president P. Damodara Rao said although the outbreak of COVID pandemic played a role in the dwindling patronage to the public sector transport buses, the management had also failed on its part to increase the number of buses in the RTC fleet in accordance with the growing population.
Expressing serious concern over failure of the management to increase the number of buses and instead, cutting down on the operations in different routes and shrinking the staff using the declining OR as a pretext, he also faulted the RTC management for what he alleged as “taking unilateral stand without considering the opinions of the lower rung staff.”
He said besides auto-rickshaws and maxicabs, app-based Ola and Uber services were taking a major chunk of the commuters, who otherwise would choose RTC buses to travel and reach their destinations, gross violation of the rulebook resorted by private bus operators, a perennial problem across the State, had been making a huge dent in the APSRTC revenue. He said if the officials failed to initiate corrective measures and stop the declining trend, the survival of the public transport organisation would be in danger.
Mr. Damodara Rao said the management should conduct a serious study into the reasons why the daily OR in RTC buses had come down from 60 lakh to 40 lakh commuters and initiate effective measures to improve its patronage.
