Faced with public wrath after a spree of major accidents involving KSRTC-SWIFT buses from the day the subsidiary agency began to run its fleet of long-distance buses in April, it has been decided to provide specialised training to drivers in defensive driving and during rainy weather.
Two drivers had been dismissed from service after the buses they drove were involved in accidents at Thiruvananthapuram and Malappuram, within hours of the service of the new buses being launched.
“A decision to impart additional training was taken in the wake of a number of accidents involving the brand new buses, after an internal probe and examining the footage from dashcams and CCTVs,” said a senior KSRTC official.
Instructions have been issued to all depots to commence awareness and training programmes from the coming week, with emphasis on defensive driving and the need to adhere to safe-speed limit during the monsoon. The training sessions will be scheduled without affecting the operation of daily schedules. The areas to be covered in the sessions led by personnel of the Motor Vehicles and Police departments will include precautions that ought to be taken at curves, inclines, through waterlogged roads and driving in the right gear. Apart from preventing accidents, the sessions were expected to improve fuel efficiency and reduce wear and tear of buses, said official sources.
They admitted that flaws like recruiting inexperienced crew to drive KSRTC-SWIFT buses, aimed at lessening expenditure on personnel, were to be largely blamed for the spree of accidents involving the brand new fleet of buses. Apart from accidents, there were instances like the one in May, when a late-night KSRTC-SWIFT bus from Bengaluru to Kozhikode got entrapped between the pillars of the KSRTC bus depot in Kozhikode after it was reportedly parked in a careless manner by its driver. It took hours to retrieve the bus, that too after cutting a metal ring on a pillar.
Even as the demand is gaining ground to prevent accidents by reducing the ’steering hours’ of KSRTC’s long-distance bus drivers and by ending the continuous double-duty system, experienced empanelled drivers who were retrenched in 2020 after being in service for over a decade, are kept wondering why they were overlooked for “inexperienced” drivers of KSRTC-SWIFT buses.
“The State government had repeatedly assured the retrenched empanelled crew that we would be taken back when the new bus services were launched. Sadly, this was not to be and people who had little or no experience in driving buses were chosen on contract basis after collecting caution deposit. The result is there for all to see – in the form of accidents involving the buses almost every day,” said Johney Mathew, who had served as an empanelled driver in the Ernakulam depot.
Another empanelled driver T.K. Santosh from Kolenchery said the KSRTC should not compromise on the safety of its passengers and that of other road users, by relying on inexperienced crew.
