The Motor Vehicles Act doesn’t allow issuing licences to large fleet operators, that is, companies that can run a transport service. That is precisely why Delhi’s 3,000 Blueline buses are essentially 3,000 individually-owned enterprises. Small is not beautiful here. The nature of the business is such that owners have no incentive to have properly trained drivers. But incentives are loaded in favour of overspeeding, drivers working far longer hours than recommended and other dangerous practices because these owners, unlike a big private transport corporation, don’t have to worry about their business reputations. Kolkata’s notoriously rickety private buses — many of them still resemble tin boxes — also operate on this business model. In other cities, lumbering public carriers do the job of ferrying people and they do it very badly.

But policymakers have a strange problem about corporatised large fleet operators. Large fleet cab operators have only recently been allowed. One can ask why the government doesn’t restrict civil aviation licences to only individuals owning aircraft, not corporations flying a fleet? The answer is there’ll be absolute chaos.There’s absolute chaos in the public transport system — the two metros in Delhi and Kolkata being the exceptions — and nothing will change until India’s policymakers understand that in public transport, big plus private means safe and viable.