A section of school bus owners visited Delhi Public School Ruby Park on Friday and handed over a letter to the vice-principal urging guardians to pay at least 50 per cent of the monthly bus fees so they could pull through during the pandemic.
The owners who had gathered at the school requested the authorities to collect half the amount that it would charge guardians on account of bus fees and hand it over to them so they could pay their drivers, helpers and attendants.
Next week, they will visit another school in south Calcutta with a similar request.
There are around 4,000 school bus operators in Calcutta and its adjoining areas, who have outsourced the service to contractors or agencies.
DPS Ruby Park has hired 45 buses, for Rs 75,000 per bus per month, to ferry their students. Bus owners said they had last received payments from the school authorities in July; since then they have not got a penny.
“The schools are now shut. The bus operators have placed their appeal with us because of the difficulty they are facing. We will definitely request the guardians,” said Indrani Chattopadhayay, the vice-principal of DPS Ruby Park. “Beyond this there is nothing much we can do about it. It’s not in our hands.”
Many schools like DPS Ruby Park have outsourced transportation of students to private bus operators, who have to arrange for the vehicles that carry an emblem of the school on them.
A few schools have their own buses. But they, too, hire buses because their own vehicles are too few compared with the number of students.
The schools collect transportation fees from guardians and pay a monthly amount to the operators, varying between Rs 60,000 to Rs 80,000 per bus. Bus owners pay monthly salaries to their staff from the monthly amount they receive from the schools. Some owners also have to pay EMIs.
With the educational institutions shut, almost all schools have stopped paying the bus owners. As their income has dried up, the owners have decided to visit schools and urge the management to find a way so they get at least a part of the stipulated amounts.
In October, Calcutta High Court had ordered that private schools in Bengal, including those run by the Church, to waive 20 per cent of their tuition fees between April 2020 and a month after the schools resume in-person classes and 20 per cent of the session fees.
The schools were barred from charging for facilities such as labs, sports and craft that students are not using during the pandemic.
In November, the Supreme Court had declined to interfere with the high court’s order on waiver.
“There was no clear instruction in the high court order on transportation fees. It is not clear whether bus service was part of the facilities that schools have been barred from charging,” said Himadri Ganguly, of the West Bengal Contract Carriage Owners and Operators Association. “We have filed a special petition with the court to clarify on this. But no date has yet been assigned for hearing.”
School bus operators had earlier appealed to chief minister Mamata Banerjee for waiving fines for late renewal of fitness certificates and doing away with mandatory taxes because they are unable to pay after remaining out of business for almost seven months amid the pandemic.
School bus owners said that with campuses shut, their vehicles had been idling in garages. They said it was discriminatory on the state government’s part to offer sops to private bus and minibus operators and ignore them in the process.
