KSRTC worried as its premium fleet gets battered on Ghat road

Mangalore/Sakleshpur: The travellers between Mangalore and Bangalore should take a couple of cushions along to endure more hours of travel between the two cities. The Shirady Ghat Road, which connects both cities, has gone bad and has become un-motorable.

The premium services of air-conditioned buses run by KSRTC and a few private operators have already reported heavy damage to the vehicles due to the battered roads. “This route is a killer of new generation vehicles,” is the bottom line of the KSRTC officials.

The National Highway 48 stretch between BC Road in Dakshina Kannada and Sakleshpur in Hassan district, a distance of 140 kilometres, is in very bad condition, due to which the front and back portions of the new generation vehicles, mainly Volvo B11R, Scania, Mercedes Benz and Corona brands, are getting battered during every trip. The road that was done up in summer for Rs. 52 crore has been washed off after the monsoons and mini lakes, and large craters formed on the roads, leaving the transport companies now thinking in terms of either rerouting their services or slowing down the travel time from present 8 hours (364 kilometres) to 10 hours.

According to the Executive Engineer of the National Highway Mangalore Division, “Sooner or later, the highway will have to close for a total redo. The Shirady ghat is a high rainfall area in the state and the hard tarmac was the only solution.” The NH Mangalore division has given a proposal for a project of concretising the entire 27-kilometer ghat section in the core area (Halliholay to Kappalli) for Rs. 115 crores.”

Top management of the KSRTC in Bengaluru said, “All the premium vehicles are sustaining big damages to the front and rear portions due to the craters, we have no option as yet in sight as the KSRTC has the largest fleet of premium services on this route, which is also profitable, but we do have to service the bank debts, this forces us to keep the services intact, and every bus will have to do not less than 800 kilometres per day to keep it profitable.

“Even if we slow down over journey time, the schedules cannot be maintained. Instead, till the stretch of BC Road to Sakleshpur gets done up again, we are now contemplating rerouting our schedules via Puttur-Sampaje-Madikeri, Ilawala (Mysuru), Mandya, and Ramnagar to Bengaluru. We will be running at least 40 kilometres extra, but our vehicles will not sustain damage and the crew will have the convenience of engaging the vehicle in higher gears to get decent speed and mileage. A scientific study taken up by Balabhaskara Reddy, senior structural engineer, and A.Veeraraghavan of Bangalore University, which has been entitled “Effects of overloading and introduction of tandem-axle trucks on pavement life”, highlights the structural damage to a pavement system caused by overloaded commercial vehicles. The paper says the overloading of trucks has assumed menacing proportions in the country.

The structural adequacy of the pavement on National Highways is inadequate to withstand the increased magnitude of axle loads. The multi-axle vehicles reduce the impact of motion on the road and distribute the weight of the vehicle and the load evenly” says an engineer of the NHAI.

But the present predicament of the bus operators including private and state-owned KSRTC is not what the KSRTC officials point out. It is the widening work and the elevated highway work which has been going on for the last three years taken up by the National Highways Authority of India, mainly between the BC Road and Sakleshpur.

This route will also have the longest elevated Highway in the state at Kalladka-Maani (for a distance of 2.8 kilometres), which is taking too much time despite all the resources are the disposal of the NHAI.