The Association of State Road Transport Undertakings (ASRTU), a member of IRU was set up on August 13, 1965, to bring together all the State road transport undertakings on a common platform. The Association is now preparing a blueprint for its next phase of growth. Under its umbrella, it has 72 members, 500 component suppliers, one million employees and collectively operates 150,000 buses that serve 70 million passengers a day. It is hoping to expand its fleet to three lakh buses that will be transporting close to one billion passengers by 2020.
Edited excerpts of MOTORINDIA’s exclusive interaction with Mr. Ananda Rao, Executive Director, ASRTU.
It has been more than 50 years since ASRTU was set up. What has been its turning point?
With the advancement of technologies, we are now into IT revolution and have embraced it for the last three years, whether it is ticketing, planning, resource management, ERP for vehicle and crew productivity, ITES or depot management, etc. We have initiated online ticketing in association with ‘Busindia.com’. We have also got into the online ticketing system where bus fares can be collected in advance, and hence there are no revenue losses. We have come up with the automatic passenger counting system (APCS) to avoid any pilferage.
What else are you working on to improve the operational efficiencies among your members?
We are actively working on tyre management, training and better driving practices. So once the three major cost components of the operation (of a transport undertaking) such as fuel, staff and tyre are taken care of, we will be able to achieve our goals of turning them around.
What measures are you taking to improve safety, hygiene and comfort of the passengers?
The ultimate goal will be setting benchmarks by having a uniform type of buses. For a city bus, we will be having a 
uniform standard everywhere whether it is in the north, south, east or west (part of India). Similarly, we will be having separate standards for urban, suburban and rural buses. We have a bus body code, Automotive Industry Standards 052 (AIS), according to which all safety standards are met. Apart from all this, we will be focussing on government-mandated safety aspects like installation of cameras, panic button, etc. We will also be working on road safety in a big way and have started implementing skill development programmes because our most important asset will be the drivers and the vehicles. We want (our buses) to be very clean, efficient, cost-competitive, and omnipresent vis-à-vis private operators. Gone are the days when people used to say, ‘government buses are unclean, unfriendly, unpunctual or unreliable’. For passengers’ comfort, we are creating a PIS system followed by an online integrated ticketing system pan India. We are also working on intermodal ticketing. Thirdly, we are also working on modalities wherein just like airlines you can pre-book your food on long distance routes like Delhi-Jammu or Bangalore-Pune.
What are the current challenges in the bus sector?
What I would like to highlight is that we are three times bigger than railways even though they have their own funding. But our STUSs are self-sustaining as there are neither any resources available for acquiring assets (like buses) nor any grants available from the centre. So therefore we will be bring world class amenities for them.
What are the potentialities that lie ahead in the bus transportation segment and how are you planning to leverage on that?
At 1.2 buses per 1,000 people, the penetration level is very minuscule. We have to double our requirement to get into the slot of three, half of that of China, which is at 6 per 1,000 people currently. There is a latent demand for public transport and have to grow as we don’t require any infrastructure. BRT system is the ultimate solution wherein we have high-capacity buses carrying more than 100 passengers on and off the loop. Some of the successful stories are Ahmedabad, Rajkot and Indore. The new one that is coming up is Hubli-Dharwar in Karnataka. We will be getting into bus operations and would be running them under extreme conditions like J&K, Pune, Orissa, North East and all these places. As per the business model, the buses will be given with a driver by the private entity and the STU will give us the route which we will operate on a pre-determined cost per km. This is on a hiring contract basis and we have already established our presence here. So these are some of the achievements and plans we have for the future and by 2020 public transport will be very strong. By that time, the total fleet count will be doubled to 3 lakh catering to 100 million passengers.