Chaos at Majestic as students queue up in huge numbers to collect passes

Team Udayavani, Sep 30, 2018, 4:27 PM IST

Bengaluru: A chaotic situation prevailed at the Kempegowda bus-stand on Saturday with as many as 5000 students queuing up at the bus-stand since early morning to avail of their bus passes.

Post a decision to replace the paper passes with smart cards, the transport body had asked students to apply for the bus passes online this academic year. These passes were supposed to be dispatched to the residences of the students directly. However, out of the more than 3 lakh applications received by the BMTC, 70,000 could not be processed for multiple reasons, including mandatory fields not filled, uploading of wrong photos etc. The BMTC had made arrangements to issue bus passes for such students at Majestic and had set up 15 counters for the purpose.

However, according to the students, only 8 counters were open here and to make matters worse no official was present at the spot to give any clarifications.

Meanwhile, a BMTC official said that the students were asked to enrol their names and numbers on the website and to get the date and time to visit the bus station to get passes for streamlining the entire process. “Every day, 3,500 passes will be issued at the 15 counters. The corporation is planning to open counters at two Shantinagar and Shivajinagar bus stands as well,” he said.