Financial Times

NTC chairman undeterred by attacks
By Quintus Perera
Some staffers at the National Transport Commission (NTC) have expressed concern over their safety after its consultant Asoka Gunasekera was shot and wounded last week but NTC chairman Prof Amal Kumarage said he would continue to do what he believes would improve transportation in the country.

Gunasekera was shot at and seriously wounded and is now lying in the Colombo National Hospital in a critical condition. The shooting stems from interested parties annoyed over reports that bus routes were to be auctioned.

Prof Kumaratunga said, in an interview last week, that the NTC has not used the word 'auction' anywhere and he himself was opposed auctioning routes because auction refers to selling off and giving up all government rights on bus routes.

Kumarage said he was very concerned over present developments in the NTC and transport sector, adding: "When politics gets into the management of bus companies and when politically affiliated trade unions determine management, it is unlikely that a good bus service could be achieved. Similarly when political affiliations are more important than professional aptitudes in the appointment of key officials in regulatory authorities, then again it is the passenger who loses."

Asked whether anybody else from the NTC or he himself was contemplating resigned, Kumarage said: "I have lost a good man in Mr Gunasekera. Other people in NTC are also extremely worried about the inability to block the opposition to the work of the NTC from unexpected quarters. Time will decide whether or when I would resign. I came here to bring about a change and I will resign the day when that is not possible."

He denied the NTC has made proposals to the government. In the past six months the NTC has been looking at ways and means of solving the acute problem in the passenger transport sector. Two out of three people in this country use bus transport and the bulk of the people are utterly dissatisfied with the kind of service that they get.

He said in a survey conducted by NTC among a random sampled 2,500 passengers, a vast majority gave negative remarks about public transport. He admitted that the industry has a number of institutionalized problems in the private bus transport. There is no clear transparent process for giving route permits and "we now have 18,000 such permits."

He said, "They are not issued over the counter and neither is there a well laid down process. So, it is given to selected people and this caused a lot of problems for the industry."

Prof Kumarage said profitable routes have been over-supplied and some such routes have around 60 percent more buses than are required. Another problem is that around 25 percent of legitimate revenue that the bus owner should get is lost at the point of collection due to passenger "over-riding" -- meaning passengers who travel more than the distance they have paid for. They don't get tickets and the efficiency of utilization of both vehicle and human resources is only at about 50 percent. Wastage due to poor technical know-how is about 20 percent. Basically the passenger pays for all these problems and the present level of fares is quite adequate to provide services where all the passengers could go seated.

He said that other public transport such as airfares and taxi fares do not rise as fast as inflation. But due to inefficiencies in the bus sector all these have to be borne by the end user while a lot of people have to pay additional for other forms of transport such as three-wheelers and vans because the bus service is not good enough. He said that many people are not contributing to the economy, because there is no proper transport or it is expensive resulting in poverty due to lack of access for people between home and the workplace.

NTC is also studying some of the new systems adopted by the Southern Provincial Council for the last five years. Among the options considered to be successful in the world are supervised agreements with operators associations where the regulator enters into a legal agreement with all the operators on a route and holds them responsible for providing the services according to stipulated standards such as adhering to starting time, journey completion time, discipline in buses, issue of tickets, school services and use of other such requirements. The second commonly used method is where operators are encouraged to make a bid for a given route to provide stipulated services which is practiced in many countries. The regulator could penalize the operator for any deviations.

Kumarage stressed that though all these alternative options have been studied no finality has been reached. Since the introduction of the NTB complaints hotline in July, over 1000 complaints from passengers indicating their dissatisfaction to the present system was received.

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