City bus fares hiked by half a rupee per km

The Regional Transport Authority (RTA) on Tuesday approved the Pune Mahanagar Parivahan Mahamandal Limited (PMPML) proposal for a fare hike of Rs0.50 paise per km. The fare hike would come into effect from Wednesday.

The fare hike would provide a relief of Rs47.89 crore to the PMPML, which is incurring additional running cost of Rs59.65 crore due to diesel price hike of Rs21.94 per litre between September 2012 and March 2013. The fare for the first two km would remain Rs5 and after that there would be a Rs1 hike for every stage of two km.

The meeting of the RTA was held on Tuesday. It was chaired by RTA chairman and district collector Vikas Deshmukh. The meeting was attended by the members, deputy commissioner of police (traffic) Vishwas Pandhare, Pune regional transport officer Arun Yeola, joint managing director of PMPML Pravin Ashtikar and deputy regional transport officer of Baramati SB More.

Deshmukh informed media persons that PMPML consumes 72,000 litres of diesel per day and incurs expenditure of Rs4.74 crore per month and Rs56.86 crore per year towards diesel. He said that despite the fare hike, the PMPML would have to bear Rs11.75 crore due to increased diesel prices in the last six months and it would be making up these gaps by increasing efficiency and increasing number of buses by repairing off-road buses.

Ashtikar said there are a total of 1,850 buses in the PMPML fleet out of which 1,313 were
on the road, while 409 were off the roads for  various reasons. Ninety buses have been added to the fleet in the last 3 to 4 months by making some of the off-the-road buses roadworthy. He said the PMPML had cumulative losses right from its formation to the tune of Rs93.78 crore, while the losses as per 2011-12 balance sheet are Rs22.87 crore.

Deshmukh said that for increasing the income fare hike alone was not the solution. Losses could be reduced by route rationalisation as well as attracting more passengers. Ashtikar said that due to the recent measures of route rationalisation, the number of passengers using PMPML buses has gone up from 10.44 lakh in October 2012 to 11.83 lakh in January 2013.