Friday, March, 29,2024

JCTSL: CMD JOGARAM HAS AN UPHILL TASK AT HAND!

Jaipur: The reins of Jaipur City Transport Services Limited (JCTSL) has been handed to Secretary LSG - Jogaram. Till now, Secretary LSG used to serve as Chairman of this company, but for the first time, a chairman has been given the charge of MD as well. Hence, Jogaram is now the CMD of JCTSL. Notably, in the three and a half years of the current government, 7 MDs have been changed. Shyam Lal Gurjar, Narendra Kumar Gupta, Naveen Jain, Yagyamitra Singh Deo, Pratibha Singh, Rajendra Kishan and now Jogaram, i.e. one MD, on average, has served for merely 6 months. It can be thus understood what negative effects the company must have borne due to frequent changes of its MDs. The company started working in the year 2007 with 400 buses and a daily ridership of 1.50 lakh commuters, to provide cheap and easy transport services to people from Jaipur and nearby areas.

As of today, the company is facing a dearth of buses as it has merely 300 buses now and by March next year, 100 more buses would be pushed out of service which were purchased in 2013. The buses are provisioned to run either for ten years or ten lakh kilometres. It is worth noting that JCTSL management has not planned to purchase additional new buses and the tender process for the purchase of new buses would take more than six months. 

Therefore, by next March, JCTSL fleet would be left with merely 200 buses and as of now, the three hundred buses cover a distance of seventy five thousand kilometres every day, generating a revenue of approximately twenty five lakh rupees per day. With a decrease in buses the revenue is also decreasing and as a result the company is going in loss. What is more worrisome is the fact that due to lackadaisical management practices, corruption is going rife and few months back, the ACB had conducted a raid wherein the bureau sleuths had nabbed company’s OSD Virendra Verma. At that time Secretary LSG Bhawani Singh Detha was Chairman of the company and word was that Virendra Verma was his favourite official. When in the year 2019, Shyamlal Gurjar was the MD, he too allegedly was engrossed in several wrongdoings, and the then LSG Secretary - Siddharth Mahajan - had carried out an investigation against Gurjar after which a chargesheet was also handed to him. It is a different matter that the chargesheet was dumped in the DoP.

Although Jogaram has a ‘full-time’ job of LSG but by appointing him as CMD of JCTSL, the state government has taken a pragmatic step. The work for purchase of electric buses, which has been stalled for several months, could now be brought to the fore by him and he can get new buses purchased as well. Keeping a tab on corruption, however, would still be a major challenge for him. Jogaram is a hardworking and dedicated IAS and he can display his abilities in bettering the situation of JCTSL, but only if the DoP does not change him too, like the MDs of the past.

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