City buses ready to hit the streets in Berhampur. Picture by Gopal Krishna Reddy

Berhampur, Feb. 19: The Odisha State Road Transport Corporation has agreed to run city buses. Residents will be able to hop on to the service in a week’s time.

In the first phase, 10 buses will run on both intra-city and inter-city routes of Berhampur, Chhatrapur and Gopalpur. “The remaining buses will be pressed into service within one to one-and-a-half month’s time,” divisional works engineer of the corporation Dilip Kumar Upadhyaya said today.

The government had twice floated tenders, in June and December last, for the service, but no bidder came forward. The urban development department had been trying to persuade the corporation to undertake the job.

“We are determined to launch the city bus service,” said Ajit Kumar Mishra, chief executive officer of Ganjam Urban Transport Services Limited, the organisation floated for the purpose.

Amiya Kumar Mishra has been appointed the manager of the service. He would look after the operation on behalf of the corporation. “We will appoint efficient drivers and conductors for the buses,” said Upadhyaya.

The service was to be taken up in pubic-private partnership mode by the Berhampur Development Authority. “But as the corporation is a state government undertaking, we expressed our inability to burden the expenditure loss of the service for the first few months. The urban development department has agreed to meet the day-to-day expenditure of the service for the initial months. We have asked the department to provide us business rotation funds to run the service,” Upadhyaya said.

The pre-condition to deposit 10 per cent of the purchase value of each bus as security money (which is estimated to be Rs 1.80 lakh) has also been relaxed for the corporation. The department would fix the fare slab for the city buses.

For the service, 25 buses have been acquired and are parked inside the flower market at Ambapua. “We will hand over the buses to the corporation,” said secretary of the development authority Manoj Padhi.

According to a government proposal, 32 buses would be deployed in the city. The government has sanctioned Rs 5.10 crore for the purpose, he said.