Bus Company Involved in Recent Rape Banned From Delhi\'s Roads

Tengku Bahar/Agence France-Presse - Getty ImagesA government owned Delhi Transport Corporation bus in New Delhi, in this May 31, 2010, file photo.

Yadav Travels, the company that owned the bus in which a woman was raped Sunday evening in Delhi, has been banned from operating in India's capital region, transportation officials have told India Ink.

The licenses and registration for all 11 of the Noida-based private company's buses have been canceled because Yadav Travels had violated their permit conditions, an official of the Delhi Transport department said Wednesday. He asked not to be identified because he w as not supposed to speak to the media.

Still, Delhi's overburdened bus transportation system, a messy patchwork of public and private operators, remains vulnerable to abuse by hundreds of rogue operators like Yadav Travels, which thrive because of a bus shortage in the capital, officials and analysts say.

“For one year, we have been struggling and no bus supplier is there to supply,” Delhi's urban development secretary, Sudhir Krishna, said at a news conference earlier this month.

Delhi's bus transport system carries some 7 million passengers a day using a combination of city-owned and operated buses under the Delhi Transport Corporation and private companies that have contracts with the city to pick up passengers at public bus stops, known as stage carriage buses. Other private companies, like Yadav Travels, have contract carrier permits, which do not allow them to pick up passengers on the street.

But these private o perators regularly operate illegally by taking passengers at public bus stops, as the Yadav Travels bus did Sunday night, because there are not enough city-owned or city-sanctioned operators traveling on these routes, passengers say.

“There is no security on these buses,” said Ranjeet Singh, who was participating in one of the protests against the rape. “They speed all the time. The government should get them off the road.”

The system is in flux, transport officials say, after the original fleet of privately owned stage carriage buses, known as Blueline buses, was phased out starting in 2007 because of numerous traffic safety violations. A new fleet of privately owned but city-sanctioned buses has yet to hit the roads on most routes.

According to a statement by the Delhi police, the driver of the Yadav Travels bus who was arrested in the rape cas e took it out for a “joy ride” with some friends. The driver decided to stop at public bus stops for passengers, with the intention of using the fares to buy alcohol, the police said.

A crime like this has never happened on a city-owned and -run bus, Sarat Kumar, a Delhi Transport Corporation official, told India Ink. “Why would a D.T.C. employee do such a thing? They get a permanent salary and benefits like pension later on. Who would want to be denied those benefits?” he said.

Drivers and conductors employed by the private carriers, on the other hand, are rarely on a permanent payroll, and many of them do not belong to Delhi, so tracking them remains difficult. For example, Ram Singh, the driver of the Yadav Travels bus, does not have a Delhi license.

About 5,000 privately run buses, also known as chartered buses, ply Delhi's streets, comparable with the 5,500 buses run by the Delhi Transport Corporation. Chartered buses commit most of the safety and permit violations among transit operators, including speeding, running red lights and stopping at unauthorized sites, Delhi's joint commissioner of police for traffic, Satyendra Garg, told India Ink.

Nearly 17,700 violations were committed by chartered buses between January and November of this year, according to Delhi Traffic Police, compared to 7,100 by city-run buses.