Berhampur to roll out City buses

Passengers alight from a bus in Berhampur. by Gopal Krishna Reddy (The Telegraph)

The city bus service, which couldn’t take off here because of civic polls, will be launched shortly. “Everything is in place and the buses will roll on the road as soon as the service operator is chosen,” said Ganjam collector Kishen Kumar. The process to finalise an operator to run the service and maintain the fleet had started earlier. “Though an expression of interest was floated to select the private party to operate the service, nobody came forward. We will start a re-tender process after the Puja vacation,” said Kumar.

Chief minister Naveen Patnaik will lay the foundation stone of the main bus depot spread over at Haladiapadar Auto Nagar, on the outskirts of the town, tomorrow. The district administration has provided 17 acres for the purpose. The area includes two acres for the city bus depot, five acres for Berhampur bus stoppage and 10 acres for a proposed market complex for passengers. Moreover, two more bus terminals are supposed to come up at Chhatrapur and Gopalpur shortly, for which, four and three acres have been allotted, respectively.

“The commissioner of the Bhubaneswar Municipal Corporation, which is already running a similar city bus service, was assigned to procure buses for the Berhampur city bus project,” said town and regional planning member of the Berhampur Development Auhtority Raj Kishore Sahu. The project is being taken up in pubic-private partnership mode by the development authority. The Berhampur Municipality had introduced the city bus service in 1991, but stopped it after some years because of heavy losses. Source: The Telegraph