Mumbai transport: BEST buses have caused 173 deaths in a decade

The recent Kurla bus accident highlights safety concerns, with 173 deaths in 1,970 BEST bus accidents over the last decade, despite a decline in incidents

MUMBAI: The recent BEST bus accident at Kurla, which killed eight people, has put the spotlight on mishaps involving the transport authority. Data from 2014-15 to 2023-24 accessed by Hindustan Times showed that in the last 10 years, 173 people have died in 1,970 accidents involving BEST buses. However, there is a year-on-year dip in the total number of accidents, fatalities and number of injured.

Wreckage of a car after a speeding Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport Undertaking (BEST) bus collided with several vehicles on a road at Kurla. (PTI)

The BEST data shows that the least number of accidents (54 with 10 fatalities) was recorded in 2023-24. Sources said the scenario was positive between April and November this year, with 35 accidents and four deaths. However, December turned out to be cruel.

In this month, there were three accidents at Kurla, Govandi and Chhatrapati Shivaji Maharaj Terminus, leading to the death of 10 people. This includes the shocking December 9 accident when a wet-lease driver operating an electric bus rammed into people and vehicles, killing eight and leaving 41 injured.

Sources pointed out that in the last decade, over 1,574 of the people in the 1,970 accidents sustained injuries. In the last four financial years, from 2020 to 2024, wet-lease operators have been involved in 482 accidents that led to the death of 36 people and left 76 people injured.

“Since 2019-20, the accident figures have dropped to double digits and have been consistently dwindling ever since,” said a BEST official. “In fact, for two years we managed to keep the number of fatal accidents—those involving deaths—under 10. However, the recent Kurla accident has put us back where we started. We have been putting in a lot of effort to keep a check on accidents but the Kurla one has revealed the chinks in the armour, not just the way in which drivers are trained but also the fact that the new automatic buses are far more advanced technologically than the old manual ones and thus have to be driven more carefully. We need a holistic makeover that takes all these factors into account.”

Transport expert A V Shenoy, reacting to BEST’s statement about accidents reducing year on year, pointed out that this could be due to the dwindling bus fleet. As per BEST’s data, in 2014 the transport authority had 3,800 buses in its fleet. The wet-lease system was introduced in 2018 with 100 buses, and by 2022 there were 1,268 wet-lease buses on the road, a substantial part of BEST’s entire fleet of 3,267 buses. Currently, of the total 2,885 buses in the fleet, there are 985 BEST-owned buses while the remaining are on wet lease run by six operators.

A senior officer from the Regional Transport Office said there was an urgent need to ensure that training modules and patterns were revised not just for BEST drivers but for motorists in totality. “Given the number of automatic vehicles now on the roads, this is necessary,” he said.