Kadamba Transport Corporation: Service before profit

BY AUGUSTO RODRIGUES

“Free transport along with free health and education inadvertently help move the wheels of the economy. People are paying a pittance for the service offered by Kadamba Transport Corporation (KTC), and if they are not satisfied, it is because we are not well understood,” reflects Derrick Pereira Neto, Managing Director of KTC.

Started in 1980, with one bus on Dusserah day, KTC was brought into existence as a “service to provide safe, reliable, comfortable, punctual, effective and efficient passenger transport to the travelling public,” and has not skewed much off the road for 43 years.

“Kadamba is the second in India when it comes to the cheapest ticket pricing, and by embracing private buses in our fold, we intend to give not just the most affordable, but the best travelling service to all Goans. Travelling will now not only be affordable, but reliable and efficient,” promises Derrick, as he goes through the details of the new scheme envisaged.

“Kadamba was never started keeping profit in mind. Expecting us to make money is akin to expecting GMC to make money. We are a service that with 550 buses is competing with 1,800 buses in the private sector,” discloses Derrick while emphasising that the corporation operates where profits are not possible because the same is later compensated by the government.

“There have been times where we have introduced routes for the sake of even two or three people travelling because the idea is to allow mobility. The wheels of the economy churn with mobility,” explains Derrick, who has been turning the wheels of the corporation for the last nine years.

“Fifty per cent of the Balrath buses given to schools stopped functioning after Covid-19 as their engines froze and Kadamba is now filling in places where Balrath buses are not working, and we are running this service at twenty per cent of the cost,” admits Derrick.

“It is true that there is a fifty per cent decline in the number of people using public transport to work after the pandemic. People have started sharing vehicles to work, and now we are there to help children to school or take elders to the market and back,” informs Derrick while going through the reasons for the decline in the use of public transport.

“Private buses were part of a disorganised sector of transport in Goa where sometimes even the owner of the bus drove in case there were no drivers. We brought in professionalism and that can also be gauged by the safety measures being adopted now,” claims Derrick as he dwells on the panic buttons and closed circuit cameras installed in new buses.

“A Russian left a bag behind on the bus, and the luggage was tracked through the CCTV. We have also detected cases of molestation in buses and with the introduction of forty-eight buses for the smart city, public transport is going forward fast,” confirms Derrick.

Apart from covering ninety thousand kilometres a day, serving ninety-five thousand people through the three thousand and twenty-three trips operated daily, KTC suffers 0.14 accidents per one lakh kilometre travelled. The total revenue earned per day is Rs twenty lakhs.

One thousand one hundred and four private buses were in operation before COVID-19 and the figure has come down to eight hundred now. “KTC was one of the few organisations that functioned during the pandemic. We lost our people while in service,” says Derrick, as he wonders aloud as to why the common man expects profit from an organisation that offers service.

As Derrick and his team at KTC focus on the formalities of amalgamating the private bus operators into their service, people in Goa should stop thinking of profits and focus on service.