Ujjain: Show cause notices issued over sorry state of affairs of city buses

Ujjain (Madhya Pradesh): Three sub-engineers Sunil Jain, Vijay Goyal and Pawan Kumar have been issued show-cause notices in the case of city buses under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission turning into junk. The Ujjain Municipal Corporation has suffered a loss of about Rs 2 crore 48 lakh due to the scrapping of these buses costing about Rs 10 crore.

The Ujjain Municipal Corporation had 50 CNG city buses in 2006, under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission but they could not be fully utilised due to the lack of CNG supply. Then some of these buses were converted into diesel buses and run by private operators. Even now select city buses are plying, but the number of passengers availing the facility is very low. In such a situation, commissioner Anshul Gupta has issued notices to the three officers.

Initially, Ujjain City Transport Services Limited was formed to run the buses in Ujjain City alone, but after some years a private operator named Earth connect Transway Private Limited was assigned a contract for these buses. The contractor, however, started running them in sub-urban areas as well and that too without a board of directors. He even did not pay the revenue for plying the buses and for the display of advertisements. Despite all such irregularities and misconduct, the three UMC employees did not take any cognisance and allegedly patronised the illegal activities of the operator in question.