Rs 25-lakh dip a day for transport utility

“With the schools,malls and cinema halls shuting down for the last two weeks,people preferred to stay at homes,unless it was really urgent. All this automatically translated into low business for the PMPML. People have been choosing to travel by autorickshaws to avoid the possibility of contracting the infection,” a PMPML official said.

“Since there were very few takers for the public transport,we decided to reduce the number of trips of our buses. We cannot afford to run the buses for just a handful of people,” the official said.

The lowest and the highest earning that the PMPML recorded between August 1 and August 10 was Rs 71.71 lakh and Rs 98.27 lakh respectively,apart from the record high collection of Rs 1.5 crore on Raksha Bandhan on August 5.

However,between August 11 and August 18,the highest collection recorded was Rs 68 lakh,while the lowest of Rs 37 lakh came on the Independence Day.

Regarding the Pune Darshan buses,PMPML depot manager at Pune station Dattatray Zende said,“It is perhaps for the first time that we have not been able to run the Pune Darshan service for a sustained period of 10 days. There is very poor response to it and we cannot run the service for only a couple of people.

The capacity of one bus is 35 passengers,and we are ready to run the bus even if 20 passengers turn up. But even this is not happening. We are losing income to the tune of Rs 3,500 on a daily basis,” he said