Single door buses introduced

Suraj A. Bandara

Single door buses will be deployed in less populated rural areas to minimize unnecessary expenditure, Deputy Transport Minister Rohana Dissanayake said.

He was addressing the employees of the Alawwa SLTB during a sudden inspection tour recently.

The Deputy Minister had inspected over 50 depots throughout the country. The Alawwa depot officials were highly criticized over the failure for not putting dilapidated buses into operation.

He instructed the officials to make the maximum use of the technicians employed at the depot and repair all non-operational buses and add them to the operational fleet soon.

At the Alawwa depot, there are around 74 buses while only 51 buses are in operation. Other buses have been housed in the garage without putting an effort to repair them.

“We were assigned the task to bring back the SLTB into a profitable institution where it will no longer be a burden to the Treasury.”

SLTB authorities used to house buses even for a minor mechanical problem. If technicians repair them swiftly all buses would have been in operation, he said. We accountable to the President, he said.

Alawwa depot records an income of Rs. 43 per kilometer. Therefore,the Minister urged officials to earn at least Rs. 45 per kilometer in lieu of the incurred losses. Alawwa depot records a daily income of Rs. 426,000.

He said all depots he visited recently have developed tremendously and he hoped that Alawwa depot would also develop overcoming the shortcomings that existed, he said.