Mumbai’s Beloved BEST: Who Is killing It, And Why?

When the tell-all story of Mumbai’s blood red or vermillion, considering that sindoor is the popular word after India’s operation against terror hotspots in Pakistan, buses is written, it would have to characterise the decade of 2015-25 as the one in which the city lost its beloved and reliable transport systems.

The sight of the red buses of the Bombay Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) trundling along on the city’s roads has been a marker of chaotic normalcy through rain and riots, its drivers were forces of authority in the buses they captained, and conductors were mostly the epitome of how to keep calm in the midst of burgeoning crowds and noise even as they urged standing passengers “pudhe chala” (move ahead).

This July would mark the beginning of the centenary year of the BEST bus services in Mumbai; the first motorised bus ran on July 15, 1926. Originally, the Bombay Tramway Company Limited, set up in 1873, presided over horse-drawn tramway service, then the Bombay Electric Supply and Tramways Company launched electric trams in 1907 and double-decker trams a decade later, before the bus service in the following decade. The BEST has a rich and glorious history that’s Mumbai’s pride and the envy of other cities.

We should have been preparing to celebrate this unique sustenance system of the city, second only to the city’s suburban railways, transporting more than three million commuters a day even today. Instead, we are nearly at the point of crafting its obituary. Its history is not the reason that the BEST should function well.

The buses should be running because so many million depend on them every day, because the bus system is still the most affordable form of transport, because its whittling down has already put an additional burden on household budgets, and because Mumbai deserves to have a robust and accessible public transport on its roads despite the glitzy high-rises.

The problems of the BEST in the past decade have been well documented. Reams have been written regularly in the local press, the BEST union has brought several facts into the public domain, and the citizens’ campaign ‘Amchi Mumbai, Amchi BEST’ has fought for its survival on many occasions, holding public hearings and urging Mumbai’s municipal commissioners to discharge their responsibilities towards the BEST bus system.

The BEST fleet is down from a heady high of more than 3,330 buses to barely 750 and is set to decline further. The current operating fleet of about 2,700 buses is largely on the wet lease model, which opened the door to private operators with their vehicles and drivers for a fee paid by the BEST.

Several routes have been discontinued or ‘rationalised’, with the axe falling on low-occupancy or distant ones. Commuters have complained of inordinately long waiting times with no information on buses. Accidents have sharply risen, including the most gruesome one in December last at Kurla. The last-mile connectivity for the metro network is still patchy.

We are repeatedly reminded that the cumulative losses over the decade have piled up to nearly Rs 9,300 crore. And that the writing is on the wall: it has to be shut down, sold over to private companies, or the existing public-private partnership model has to be deepened.

The first cannot be easy or non-controversial, though municipal commissioners—the BMC is the parent body of the autonomous BEST—have attempted it. The second would be lucrative for a private entity if the terms could be worked out; whittling down BEST and diminishing its value may well be a part of the gameplan.

But it is really the third option that the BEST seems to be dragged towards—that the BEST services can be finished off because the net worth is more than its buses and the 450 routes connecting Mumbai, including its popular air-conditioned ones, and that the organisation is sitting pretty over many hundreds of hectares of land, some of it in prime locations, all across Mumbai that has been eyed by the city’s real estate lobby for years. Depots have been tentatively opened up to private builders at a couple of locations, including the sea-facing Mahim depot that now houses a luxury residential tower, and plans are reportedly afoot for more depots to be monetised.

Ideally, if the monetisation is done rationally with an eye to mobilising resources, with public oversight in some form, and these are used to shore up the services in number, routes, and punctuality, then it may be worth it. But what if this turns out to be a Faustian bargain? And it may well be given how the BEST has been run into the ground. If the BEST is valued only for its land and other assets, depending on the terms and conditions of the lease of the large tracts of land, we may well be staring at the end of the bus service as we have known it.

This, simply, cannot be allowed to happen. If the BMC, with its eye-popping budget of Rs 76,000-plus crore, is telling us that it cannot support the city’s public transport system, we have to demand answers and move the needle towards revitalising the system. Mumbai’s opinion leaders and decision-makers, those who use two-wheelers and private vehicles, could not be bothered by how the 3.5 million bus commuters make their way. What a sad, infuriating state of affairs.

Smruti Koppikar, senior journalist and urban chronicler, writes extensively on cities, development, gender, and the media. She is the Founder Editor of the award-winning online journal ‘Question of Cities’ and won the Laadli Media Award 2024 for her writing in this column.

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