Economics of State-owned Passenger Transport in Kolkata

• Published in: Journal of infrastructure development 2015-12, Vol.7 (2), p.101-115
• Main Authors: Chakrabartty, Aparajita, Gupta, Sudakshina
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• ISSN: 0974-9306; 0975-5969
• DOI: 10.1177/0974930615609480

In developing countries, rapid urbanisation has led to an increase in the demand for transport, aggravating problems of pollution, congestion and accidents. Increasing public transport availability is one way of addressing these problems. In the Indian city of Kolkata, buses cater to a large number of people in the metropolitan area and are run by private operators as well as by the state government. Corporations owned by the state, known as state transport undertakings, operate buses. There is, however, a general complaint that the state-run buses show poor performance in nearly every sphere, including inefficient staff, irregular service, ill-maintained fleet, etc. The objective of this study is to look at the physical, financial and manpower performance of the different state transport corporations to find out whether these corporations operate efficiently. The results indicate that there is underutilisation of fleet, defective employment policy, wrong purchase policy, poor revenue generation, etc. on the part of all the corporations.