Bhubaneswar, Feb. 16: The next time you board a city bus, remember to carry enough small change. Otherwise, you might end up getting into an altercation with the conductor over exact changes for tickets.

The problem of coin shortage has been plaguing the operators running the city bus service in Bhubaneswar, Cuttack and Puri for quite a while now. And it is likely to persist for longer.

Dream Team Sahara (DTS), the operator, requested the Reserve Bank of India (RBI) several times in the past two months to provide them enough small change on a daily basis. However, the RBI is yet to respond to their request.

“We wanted around Rs 20,000 in coins daily for all the buses plying in the three cities. The RBI officials told us that a person could get Rs 500 to Rs 1,000 in coins only if he/she queues up before the counters. But it’s not feasible for us, as our staff cannot wait in those long queues because it’s time-consuming,” said a DTS official.

Apart from frequent arguments between the passengers and conductors over the issue, there have been a few incidents of violence as well.

“We face a lot of problems regularly because of shortage of coins. The passengers confront the conductors, who are always at the receiving end. So, we wrote to the RBI to provide us coins on a daily basis,” said Sudhanshu Jena, chief executive officer of DTS.

On February 14 this year, the employees of city bus service sat on a dharna in front of the Khandagiri police station to protest against the arrest of a conductor who had been accused of misbehaving with a passenger over returning Re1.

Last year, on October 23, the police in the capital arrested a city bus conductor for assaulting a passenger over return of changes.

The bus conductors allege that most passengers give them notes while paying fares. “The commuters get agitated if we do not return them the change immediately. At times, we ask them to wait for a while, as we don’t have enough change with us. But they are just not ready to listen. Most of the time we have to face the wrath of passengers and then the police,” said a bus conductor, on condition of anonymity.

However, the commuters have an entirely different version. “Once, a conductor returned me a rupee short. When I asked him, he told me to collect it the next day. But the next day there was a different conductor, who said he didn’t know anything about it and refused to return the money. Such activities are going on rampantly,” said Bibhuti Pradhan, an employee of East Coast Railway.

Nilambar Patri, treasurer of RBI, said that his wing had been instructed by the head office to give coins to the public for which people have to stand in queues before the counter. “But I have not got any instruction regarding the DTS application,” said Patri.