Gurugram resumes bus services to 4 districts

GURUGRAM: After being shut for nearly two months due to Covid-19 lockdown , the Gurugram depot of Haryana Roadways has begun inter-district bus services. The services, in fact, resumed on Tuesday but on the Panchkula route only, and were extended to three more routes — Sirsa, Palwal and Faridabad — a day after.

While two buses left for Panchkula around 8am on Wednesday morning, one bus left for Sirsa a little later. However, the proposed services for Palwal and Faridabad had to be called off at the last moment due to lack of passengers. Senior roadways officials said they were also in discussions with depots of other districts like Rewari and Hisar. And services from Haryana Roadways depots in Delhi have also begun.

“Our services caught some pace on Wednesday. We sent two buses to Panchkula and one to Sirsa. We had also planned to run buses from Gurugram to Faridabad and Palwal but had to drop the plan at the last moment. While there was no booking for Palwal, only one was for Faridabad. Taking out the bus for just one passenger was not feasible,” Anu Sheokand, general manager, Haryana Roadways, told TOI.

Haryana Roadways had also planned to resume bus services to two more districts — Rohtak and Rewari — from Thursday. The decision, however, has been deferred, following a late evening request raised by the administration to send migrant workers to four different districts of Uttar Pradesh. “We have pushed that plan by a day as of now,” Sheokand said.

Though bus services from Haryana Roadways depots in Delhi have also begun, the inter-state services, however, remain suspended in the absence of a consent from other states. The state government has written letters to six states — Uttar Pradesh, Rajasthan, Punjab, Himachal Pradesh, Madhya Pradesh and Uttarakhand — and two Union territories — Delhi and Chandigarh — seeking their consent to start inter-state bus services.

“We’ve been using services of Haryana Roadways to take batches of migrants to different states. And now that inter-state movement can begin, given the consent of the source and destination states, we want to extend the services to expedite the inter-state movement of workers and others who’ve been longing to go back to their homes, ” said a government official.

Meanwhile, transport officials will now start keeping daily medical reports of their staff to track their health status to avoid chances of community transmission of Covid . “We are also making sanitized arrangements for overnight stay of drivers from different districts,” an official said.