Scores of Lives Getting Lost Due To Flawed All India Bus Permit System
All India Tourist Permit is limited to only those buses that intend to take people travelling through several states, essentially for tourism or visits to various religious places in India.
ANANTAPUR: The All India Tourist Permit system of 2020, used to govern private buses travelling throughout the country, is being questioned following the horrible death of 19 persons in the mishap near the Kurnool city of Andhra Pradesh on Friday.
All India Tourist Permit is limited to only those buses that intend to take people travelling through several states, essentially for tourism or visits to various religious places in India.
This permit is being used by private parties to transport people from point to point within two states between which travel of people is high, for example between Hyderabad and Bengaluru.
Strangely, a high number of these buses are registered in Nagaland and Diu-Daman. But, day in and day out, they transport people between Hyderabad and Bengaluru and vice versa, as the passenger traffic cannot be met by the state-owned buses or trains. These private bus operators transport people in the name of tourists, thereby violating the very purpose of the 2020 All India Tourist Permit.
Moreover, the All India tourist buses must not cross the maximum speed of 100 km per hour. This speed is to be restricted further in case the bus is travelling through residential or forest and ghat areas. But the speed limit is often violated by the buses to reach the destination within the deadline fixed by the bus operators, so that the bus is available for taking the next batch of passengers.
Incidentally, any bus operating on roads is expected to obtain the fitness certificate from the road transport authority with which the bus registered. This certificate is to be obtained for a bus once it travels over a distance of 3,452 km or for 66 hours.
More than 200 private travel buses, whose owners are based in AP and Telangana, are operating between Bengaluru and Hyderabad alone via Kurnool and Anantapur every day. They are blatantly violating the rules stipulated within the All India Bus Permit rules.
Moreover, they are registering their buses in Nagaland and Daman-Diu, as the registration fee is far lesser in those states than in AP and TG, where the charge is on an average ₹2,000 per seat or ₹12,000 per bus for six months.
A senior Road Transport Authority official is astonished how Nagaland-registered buses are acquiring fitness certificates without taking their buses to Nagaland for getting the fitness of their buses checked and acquiring the certificate.
The wide difference in fees between state to state within India is responsible for such large-scale irregularities. Strange is the case of Ashok Leyland’s BS-IV vehicles that the company sold towards scrap three years ago. A party in Anantapur acquired these buses and went on to register them as BS-VI vehicles and is operating them in AP and Telangana.
In this particular case, Tadipatri municipal chairman J.C. Prabhakar Reddy, his family members and close aides are facing cases registered by the Enforcement Directorate (ED).
Officials suggest that the All India Tourist Permit required thorough revamping, as the permit system is playing with the lives of passengers without the bus operators paying any additional taxes or fees while passing through from one state to another.
