Ticket..Ticket..Ticket? Failure to Issue Tickets & for having Shrill Horns Police Seize 34 Buses
Mangaluru: When you step into any private buses that ply in the City, the first thing you’ll hear the mantra from the conductor chanting the words-“Ticket..ticket..ticket?? But there are few bus conductors who only utter these words and take the actual amount of the fare but very seldom issue tickets to the passengers- so how will the owner know how many passengers traveled on that given day? What happens to the money collected by the conductors from the passengers? These are the questions that remain unanswered and will never be answered for years?
Having received various complaints from the commuters during the phone-in programme to Police Commissioner T R Suresh every Friday, regarding bus conductors deliberately not issuing tickets to the passengers, and also about the loud noise from the shrill horns- and having fed up of such bus conductors, the RTO Officials partnering with City Traffic police swung into action on Monday, 15 October and were able to seize nearly 34 private buses, after coming to know that tickets were not issued to the passengers on few buses. All the seized buses are now seen parked in Nehru Maidan.
Even though the RTO and police officials, including the Police Commissioner, DCP Uma Prashanth and others had warned the bus conductors that if they don’t issue tickets strict and if they don’t remove the shrill horns, action will be taken against them, and also buses will be seized. This move by the RTO and police authorities action comes after both the department’s had made constant orders in this regard, but unfortunately were not followed up the operators, including the bus conductors. This drive was supervised by ACP (Traffic) Manjunath Shetty, along with a bevy of police constables.
Clarifying about this issue, speaking to Team Mangalorean, Dilraj Alva, President of DK Private Bus Operators Association said, “The issue has been clarified and settled with the RTO and police officials and all the buses have been released. Actually, the buses were not seized, but since the cops were not able to check for violations on the busy road, they made the buses to park in the Nehru Maidan. Regarding the shrill horn issue, actually the RTO and police earlier
had suggested we use City Horn model, and the buses are installed with such horns. How can they prove that these horns have high decimals when RTO officials didn’t even have the device to do the checks. When the RTO insisted that he will slap a minimum penalty on us, we objected to it, and if he does we warned that we will take the matter to court. Eventually, the matter was settled, and all the buses were allowed to go. More discussions on this issue will be held on a later date with the RTO and Police department”.
