Mumbai: BEST Bachao team and unions urge MLAs for critical funding

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Alarmed with a falling number of buses in the fleet, the BEST Bachao team and trade unions approached all 36 MLAs from Mumbai, urging them to ask BMC to provide funds to the BEST undertaking to buy more buses. The BEST is commemorating 77 years of its municipalisation on Wednesday.

Mid-Day had highlighted a story on July 10 on the dwindling number of BEST buses. The number of self-owned buses in the BEST undertaking's fleet is rapidly decreasing. Shockingly, the organisation has not purchased a single bus in the past six years. The latest RTI figures revealed that BEST's own fleet was down to nearly just 1,000 buses, with 2,200-plus buses taken by the undertaking on a wet lease (contractor-owned with their staff).

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"The best bus service in Mumbai comes under the Mumbai Municipal Corporation. It is the right of Mumbaikars to get good public transport service at low cost and it is the duty of the Municipal Corporation to provide that service. For this, the BEST undertaking needs to have 3,337 self-owned buses. Today, the BEST has only 1,078 (33%) self-owned buses left, which is an alarming situation," BEST Workers' Union general secretary Shashank Sharad Rao said.

"Almost a lakh crore to be spent on Metro rail which has such a poor record. And they are starving the BEST, causing misery to millions," transport activist Vidyadhar Date said.

"If the Mumbai Municipal Corporation does not immediately fund the BEST undertaking to buy new buses, BEST, the public transport service known as Mumbai's lifeline, will shut down after December 2025," Rao said.

"We are going to issue a statement to them under the BEST Bachao campaign between August 7 and August 10 that all the MLAs of Mumbai should make an effort to fund the BEST initiative by Mumbai Municipal Corporation to buy new buses so that Mumbaikars can continue to get BEST transport services, he added.