The pandemic has hit hard private bus operators with no business for more than three months, but a small city-based private bus operator Munirathnam Travels has shown the determination to keep afloat by modifying two of his buses to ensure social distancing was perfectly maintained as per the protocols.
“Passengers’ safety is utmost on our minds and with the fight against the pandemic likely to stretch into next calendar year, we decided to reduce the number of seats from 40 to 29 in two of our buses that used to run on the Anantapur - Hyderabad route,” owner N. Munirathnam Srinivasulu said on Sunday.
Buses used to have 2 + 2 seating patterns earlier, but now an entire column of the seats has been removed and there is only one seat in the middle with enough space to walk in between two window seats. While the front row will have seat belts, the ones behind them have been provided with footrest and a handle to keep the balance especially in the middle seats, he pointed out.
Now, the goal of ensuring safety could have been achieved even without him having to get the seats removed, but Mr. Munirathnam decided to spend ₹2 lakh on each of the two buses because he anticipated passengers would flout the norms and occupy the empty ones in the event of unavailability of seats.
Bus services between Andhra Pradesh and Telangana were to be resumed from last week, but in view of a steep rise in the number of cases both in Hyderabad and Anantapur, permission has not been given yet. “We are getting ready with all requirements to ensure that we can operate from day one, but there could be a small hike in the fare (₹50 to ₹100 per ticket) to compensate for the loss of revenue due to reduced number of seats,” he explained.
