Mahayuti will focus on making BEST financially sustainable: Ameet Satam

The BJP-led Mahayuti alliance aims to make Mumbai's BEST financially sustainable by enhancing revenue, optimizing routes, and addressing revenue leakages.

MUMBAI: Making the cash-strapped Brihanmumbai Electric Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking financially sustainable will be one of the key priorities of the BJP-led Mahayuti alliance in the BMC, Mumbai BJP president and MLA Ameet Satam said on Thursday.

Mahayuti will focus on making BEST financially sustainable: Ameet Satam

Speaking about the alliance’s plans for BEST, Satam said the focus would be on ensuring that the transport undertaking generated enough revenue to meet its own expenditure. “The aim is to make BEST sustainable. Its income should be enough to cover its expenses, and expenditure should not exceed revenue,” he said.

Satam said the BEST budget and the transport undertaking’s financial condition would be discussed in detail in the upcoming BEST committee and standing committee meetings, describing the subject as “very complicated and comprehensive.” He pointed to concerns about revenue leakages from wet-lease bus operations, stating that the income that BEST was expected to receive from wet-leased buses might not be fully reaching the undertaking’s accounts. He also flagged lower-than-expected advertisement revenue as another area of concern.

The BJP leader said the Mahayuti had also reviewed the functioning of feeder routes after the expansion of the metro network in Mumbai. According to him, bus deployment and route planning needed to be aligned with commuter demand and connectivity requirements. “For instance, Siddhivinayak Temple sees heavy footfall on Tuesdays while Juhu Beach attracts large crowds on weekends,” he said. “We have studied whether buses are being deployed effectively to such locations and whether proper feeder routes have been created to connect commuters to Metro stations.”

As part of the measures, Satam announced that a new BEST route between Dadar and Siddhivinayak Temple would be inaugurated on Saturday. He said the Mahayuti alliance was preparing a broader roadmap to improve BEST’s financial health and operational efficiency with the long-term goal of reducing losses and making the undertaking self-sustaining.