E Arun & Tarun Kartick
Port Blair, Feb 13: Day by day the population of our Islands is increasing and also more and more people are settling around Port Blair and its outskirts and so is increasing the demand for Public Transportation. The State Transport Services at this stage is worsening the situation of the Public Transport System of these Islands by introducing more and more Mini Busses instead of long chassis busses in these Islands.
Today as commuters travel around Port Blair they face a lot of difficulties as most of the State Transport busses running around the town and outskirts are Mini Busses, having only 32 seats and these busses are not sufficient to cater the growing needs of General Public.
During peak hours the situation becomes worse because students studying in schools and colleges around the town travels through these busses and these students and the General commuters are compelled to hang out on stairs of busses because during this time there is not even an inch of space left in these buses.
This extra rush in the busses is just because to these Mini Buses, which are run by the State Transport Department.
“We have to face a lot of difficulties to travel to our school at Aderdeen Bazar because there is no space in the new mini buses of STS and all the private busses are also Jam-packed. There is no guarantee to reach school on time when we travel through private busses. We also have to stand the whole way, sandwiched between other male passengers and generally we suffer inconvenience everyday,” said a Girl student travelling everyday to her school from a remote South Andaman village to Aberdeen Bazar.
When Andaman Sheekha contacted Mr. Biju Samuel, Assistant Director Transport, Road Transport Officer to know the reasons behind purchase of only mini-buses Mr. Biju informed that the policy of the administration now is to order only Mini Busses for these islands and he also mentioned that the Lt. Governor while inaugurating the new bus terminus at Rangat had told that the Administration will order small buses in order to encourage more employment.
Mr.Biju added that last month the department had received thirty three Mini Busses out of which fifteen are in Port Blair and the rest are deployed in Out Stations and next month the department will receive another fleet of thirty seven busses which will be deployed according to the demand.
When Andaman Sheekha asked Mr. Biju about his opinion on what is better Mini Busses or Long Chassis Buses he said that in these islands specially for Port Blair Long Chassis busses are the best because they carry more number of passengers and they are easy to repair too. Long buses use less number of electronic controlled equipments whereas he said the Mini Busses that the administration is ordering has a lot of electronic controlled equipments that can only be repaired by One Particular Business House, because the Transport Department does not have the know-how of repairing electronically controlled busses.
When asked about the steps that the department has taken to order new Long-Chassis busses for these Islands Mr. Biju informed that for that the policy of the administration has to be changed, before that nothing could be done.
Long Chassis Busses are the need of the hour and the Administration should consider bringing in Long Chassis busses in these Islands for catering the transportation needs of the General Public.
The New mini buses not only creating problems for the domicile of Port Blair area or city area. It become more trouble some for North & Middle Andaman, where most of the times passengers have to depend only on the STS Buses and it has seen that even most of the times the long Chassis buses fail to cater the passengers. Becusae in North & Middle Andaman there is not availability of buses in every 30 minutes, passengers have to wait for more than 1 to 2 hours to go ones destination.
Now the question is that when the new Minibuses were stands at Khidirpur Dockyard (kolkata) for may months and administration also paid huge tax to the Port authority unnecessary and after long delay a Expert Team was sent to Kolkata to verify the buses whether it would be ply able for Andaman & Nicobar or not. It has come to the light from some trustworthy sources that the Expert rejected all these buses with Foot Notes that these buses are not suitable for the A & N Islands. Then, why the Administration took these buses ignoring the experts advice? Now my personal view is that some thing has happened like the Defense Helicopter Dealings. Hence, I think a high level Inquiry is needed to know what was the interest of Administration for purchasing these “Monkey” Buses ignoring the Experts advice.