Goa’s Minister for Transport Mauvin Godinho was almost relieved to announce this week that the State would ‘soon’ be receiving 500 electric buses thanks to the generosity of the IIT alumni association which agreed to fund Rs 700 crore under their corporate social responsibility scheme to set up a sustainable transport system in the State.
It is no secret that Goa’s Kadamba Transport Corporation is facing an acute shortage of buses, a fact that was even admitted by Godinho during the recently concluded monsoon session of the Goa Legislative Assembly, who expressed his inability to provide buses along new routes because the Corporation was unable to serve existing routes.
More than that, however, the shortage is evident every morning and even at the Margao and Panaji bus stands where long queues for buses connecting Margao, Panjim and Vasco force daily commuters to wait hours on end for buses to arrive. It’s not just the regular routes. The interstate routes are the first to be culled when faced with a shortage and as such the KTC is running interstate routes at skeletal strength. Similarly, other regular intra-state routes are facing irregular buses due to the shortage.
The shortage is a direct consequence of the government’s blind faith in its electric bus procurement policy. Having decided to cease buying diesel buses, the Goa government has been waiting for months on end for the Hyderabad-based e-bus provider to supply the promised. The Olectra company supplying 150 e-buses to the State failed to provide the needed number prompting the KTC to issue a show cause notice. While the news of the supply of 500 new electric buses is welcome, it doesn’t solve the issues facing commuters for the present.
No doubt, the government has said that it has approved KTC's proposal to buy 50 diesel buses as a short-term arrangement to tide over the current shortage, writing off diesel buses appears premature. There is no denying the virtue of choosing to pursue an all-electric mode of public transport, but it is a policy that misses the larger picture.
Using public transport instead of personal vehicles is already a big step towards a sustainable future. Rather than pushing for electrification of the fleet, the government will be taking a much larger step towards sustainability if it gets people to minimise the use of personal vehicles and gets as many people as possible to embrace public transport.
It’s a plan that has also been supported by the likes of Shrinivas Dempo who mooted that an efficient and reliable public transport system in Goa will bring all round benefits -- reduced traffic jams, fewer vehicles on the streets, less dust, fewer accidents, especially among two-wheeler riders and healthier streets for everyone.
It will be a net positive for the environment if the government saturates the State’s public transport system. However, by focusing on electrification at the cost of the number of buses on the street -- leading to crowded buses, long wait times and basically every incentive for people to use their own personal vehicles, the state is making a counterproductive move.
It is imperative that the Goa government does not make its electrification push at the cost of the number of buses on the street but instead strive to push out a “sustainable public mobility system” in the true sense of the word. A sustainable public mobility system is not necessarily one that runs on electricity, but one that reduces personal vehicle use. Once an efficient and reliable system is in place, it won’t matter whether it's electric or not, it will already be making a difference.
