BEST committee passes resolution seeking financial grant, not a loan

Members of the BrihanMumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) management committee, on Thursday, passed a unanimous resolution demanding that the BrihanMumbai Municipal Corporation (BMC) should provide Rs 406 crore financial aid in the form of a grant and not a loan. In the 2021-22 budget, BMC had proposed to grant Rs 406 crore loan to BEST in order to ease off its financial burden.

BEST has annual outstanding expenses worth Rs 2,483 crore, which includes government taxes worth Rs 101 crore, electricity duty worth Rs 564 crore, short term loans worth Rs 425 crore, and long term loans worth Rs 350 crore, amongst other expenses. Members of the committee stated another loan will only increase the financial burden of BEST. “Considering the heavy loss of the transport body, BMC should provide financial aid in the form of a grant and not a loan,” said Ravi Raja, leader of opposition (LoP) in BMC and BEST committee member told the Free Press Journal.

“At the same time, BEST also needs to pull up its socks. Since the past four years, it has been sending a deficit budget to the corporation and now they have to think of ways for revenue generation,” Raja added. In the 2020-21 financial budget, BMC had proposed Rs 1,500 crore financial aid to BEST. However, owing to the pandemic, the civic body had slashed the budget by Rs 500 crore.

In view of the pandemic, the Indian Railways had converted several coaches into COVID Care Centres -- 892 coaches on Central Railway (CR) and Western Railway (WR). Almost a year later, the railway authorities in Mumbai started re-converting unused COVID care coaches into normal ones.

The two railways together created isolation units meant for treating COVID-19 patients in these coaches for which they spent close to Rs 6 crore on these 892 coaches.

Now, even though there is a slow and steady spike in the number of corona cases, the state government and Indian Railways are reconverting the isolation units back into regular sleeper coaches.

Sources in CR said the authorities have already begun work of restoring the isolation units at more than 40 percent. “Since November, we began this work on these isolation coaches to be converted into regular non-AC sleeper coaches,” said a CR official.

The CR had set up 482 Covid Care Coaches at a cost of Rs 3.8 crore and now close to 200 of these coaches have been refurbished into regular coaches. The CR officials said that there is nominal cost involved in redoing it into normal coaches as they are simply removing the paraphernalia and replacing them with seats.