Once you get to the city, one would be forgiven to think that it is a minor hop to get to the maximum 3-4 kms to your destination. But in case if you are travelling by the city busses – mostly unsupervised as the traffic cops and the road transport department are not really supervisory bodies – it takes you a good half an hour to just get out of the bus stand itself.
After that it is an agonizing haul at snail’s pace with stops almost every 20 mts and – if you have the ill luck to travel at peak hours – most of the state’s office going public do – then it is a daily grind.
Road side conferences: Once the buses leave for various places then there are these ‘conferences’ that the city busses have – three or four of them gather and try to woo commuters. Most of the conductors do not uses uniforms and many a times, no tickets are issued.
Passengers are packed like sardines.
Everywhere is a stop: Recently the transport director had told Herald that buses that did not stop at the bus stops would be fined up to Rs 2000. But to those travelling by bus, this has not happened and busses stop every now and then, block traffic, create traffic jams, halt at blind turns, T intersections – in short at all places that one is not supposed to halt- probably secure that they will not be touched for reasons best known to them and speculated upon by us.
