Category Archives: Musings of Bangalore

Bangalore Transport Service

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india-6274264_1280The students of the Bangalore University must be one of the toughest thanks to the BTS buses they travel in. With a population of more than half a crore and the prevalent birth rate, Bangalore is clearly inadequate in its Public Transport System. Forget a seat or place inside, in many a trip one doesn’t get a place on the footboard or even the ladder behind.

There is a civilized queue system in most cities, but this concept is unheard of at most bus stops in Bangalore. As soon as the bus is spotted, there is a mad scramble to get on, with everyone joining in the rushing, pushing and jostling. One is reminded of the game of rugby, where players act in a similar manner once the referee blows his whistle. One not only loses his breath on finally entering the bus, but also ends up losing a small article like a pen, hanky or some coins. Recently one poor chap lost one of his shoes, which fell off the bus and was mercilessly trampled by the cordon of vehicles behind. The number of people hanging for their dear lives makes the bus tilt at almost 45 degrees. This makes the onlooker wonder how these buses travel day after day, night after night, without overturning occasionally.

As if this isn’t bad enough, many of the trips due to some uncanny reason don’t even turn up and if they do, just whiz past your stop. This makes a tired and weary you, whose patience has already been tested to the limit, do nothing else but bang your head in frustration. To make matters worse, most conductors are far from polite, treating you like cattle and giving student bus-pass holders a ‘step-conductorly, treatment. Then the conductor is always ready with his war-cry ‘Munde hogi, Munde hogi’, as one is helplessly swung like a bar-pendulum in the suffocating atmosphere of the bus.

BTS has no further sense of time. A bus might come 15 minutes early or half an hour late. Further delays might be caused by frequent breakdowns or the whims of a driver. It may not sound true, but one bus-driver on his daily morning trip to Hessarghetta would stop the bus at a certain point, where he would meet a girl and they would chat sweet nothing for 5-10 minutes unaware of the rising frustration around them. If anyone chance objected, he would find himself speaking to a brick wall. Then one shouldn’t be surprised if one hears non-chalant remarks like: ‘No today, we are not going upto KR Market, only Majestic or ‘No, we are taking a different route today.’

Snap strikes are also nothing uncommon here. Half an hour strikes, one hour strikes, two hour strikes, morning strikes, afternoon strikes, Shivajinagar strikes, Majestic strikes, Subashnagar strikes…… The frustration of the average customer was evident in one ‘evening strike’ which occurred at Majestic last year. About 10 buses were burnt and a 100 damaged. It is to be noted that at the height of the Mandal Commission agitation, no student burnt a single bus in Bangalore, only some were painted with slogans. The problem with any strikes in this list of never ending strikes is that the cause is never genuine. In the above mentioned strike, a conductor had hit a member of the fairer sex. In another case, a drunken driver had created nuisance and was in the lock-up. This formed the pretext for a snap strike.

Even the condition of the buses is nothing to brag about, with seats not upto the mark and some of the roofs being so bad in the rainy season, at times one has to open an umbrella inside the bus! Also some of the buses have such loud screeching brakes, that you can hear them clearly if you happen to live near a bus-stop. This however works out to be an advantage as no two buses have the same screech. Say bus no. 271 has a high pitched sound and 272 a low one. If you’re late and haven’t heard the screech of your pitch, you haven’t missed the bus.

However, good buses or bad ones, happy journeys or sad ones, long waits or short waits, polite conductors or rude ones, small crowds or big crowds, sitting travel or footboard, walking to catch a bus or running, punctual trips or late ones, strikes or no strikes, all that is the lot of the common Bangalore student. One can be consoled by the fact that daily travel by BTS is nothing short of a mini-commando course and hence the student is fighting fit.

At the height of the ‘My heart Beats for India’ ad campaign of the Congress in 1989, someone rightly remarked:
‘My Heart BTS for Bangalore’.

(This essay won first prize in an essay contest and was published in The Student Mail newspaper in November 1992)

Callous officials, wasted efforts

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The roots of education are bitter, but the fruit is sweet.
—Aristotle

With the declaration of results, Bangalore University students are finding the fruits as bitter as the roots.

Every year, the examination results bring some new complications for students who have slogged mercilessly throughout the year. This year it is the passing-out final year degree students of Bangalore University who are in deep trouble.

The results were out so late (they were expected June-end, but came only in August) that many couldn’t join the post-graduation courses they had applied for as the time for admission had elapsed. There are many students who have cleared the Indian Institute of Management MBA entrance examination and many other competitive exams, but now, because of the delay, all their efforts have simply gone down the drain.

Not only has a year been lost, but there is no certainty about the same competitive examinations being cleared in the subsequent attempts. Hence even bright students find their careers in jeopardy.

How much money you have to shell out and where, to get your work done, seems to be an open secret. A newspaper report once busted a racket in a college where you could “hire” your paper for a couple of days for Rs 5000. In this way, you could change your answers and make additions long after submitting your paper on the day of the examination. Some might find this process too tedious. They simply pay to pass directly.

A girl student was shocked to find that she had failed, but on cross-checking with the university, she found that she was actually a rank holder! In another case, a bundle of answer papers wasn’t dispatched from the examination to the valuation centre. This was discovered after the results were out.

Last year’s degree results had really gone haywire. Insiders had taken money and tampered with the annual examination results. An example is a student who had got 08 marks in a subject. He had it changed to 80. We have heard of students failing narrowly in subjects and paying money to pass. But this was a case of bribery in which someone who hadn’t even got double digits had ended up with distinction.

When the students started receiving their mark sheets in mid-1991, there were shock waves in the degree colleges. Some students had got through in subjects they had not even studied. Kannada students passed in Hindi. And Hindi students failed in Kannada. The examinations might have taken place in 1991, but many had passed in 1981! The confusion of the subjects and the years was bad enough, but studying hard for an examination, writing it and finding oneself marked absent was more frustrating. On the other hand, absent students found themselves passing out with flying colours.

Such mix-ups create havoc in a student’s life. If you thought having your subject changed was the limit, how about a change of faculty. This is just what happened after a certain “scrutiny” had taken place in the university. One shudders to think what the picture might have been before the scrutiny.

The reports on the goings-on in the university were many. Tampering had taken place at all stages from evaluation to tabulation. At places 3 was made 8, while 1 had become 9. Hence 35 could easily be made 85 and so on. Such alterations can be detected, but what if the answer booklet itself had been altered.

The university officials said they were inquiring into the matter. The result of the inquiry was that 3,002 errors were detected. Great! But how many undetected? Maybe tens of thousands. How many hours of hard work down the drain? Lakhs and lakhs…

Students went on strike. Rasta rokos. Cries for autonomy. Demands for justice. Articles and letters in newspapers. The result? A big naught.

Sending your papers for revaluation means losing a hundred rupees. Retotalling means twenty lost. A student had got first class and sent one of his papers for revaluation. The result was an increase of one mark. The remarks? Failed! This engineering student took his case to the newspapers which published both his mark sheets.

Such errors cause great hardship and come in the way of further studies. Another engineering student, who got a first class, was taken aback to find that the official concerned had entered his class as second. He went to the States for a post-graduate course. The institute there demanded a first division and rejected the faulty certificate. The student’s father gave the certificate for correction. The university lost it. Time was lost and the student even faced the prospect of repatriation.

The university has a penchant for losing important documents. This is just another example of carelessness where one wrong word on a certificate can result in the destruction of a career. With rising frustration, students are losing faith in the system.

In 1990, the “Year of the Engineering Student”, future engineers saw their results go topsy-turvy. Batches of students were marked absent in certain papers. A survey was done and it was found that about 30 per cent of the students had received incorrect mark sheets. Three out of ten is quite high.

The whole incident took an unexpected turn when the Vice Chancellor nullified the results of more than a hundred students. A hundred careers knocked down in a single stroke.

Bangalore University is not a stray case. It is an integral part of the whole education system which is decaying.

Till the eighties, there was faith left at least in the civil services, the IITs and the IIMs. The civil services papers are now being leaked regularly while the latest IIT-JEE, it was reported, had six faulty questions in a total of 40. With thousands taking the examination, a single question can cause a massive swing in the merit list. What do you make of six wrong questions?

One incident shows that at least the average student hasn’t lost his sense of humour.

There was a poster, with three bold words: Jesus never fails.
To this, someone had scribbled as addition:
…because he never was a student of Bangalore University

(This article appeared in Deccan Herald newspaper on October 16, 1992)