Tamil Nadu - Chennai

Just a fleeting moment of peace for them

— PHOTO: M.Karunakaran

balancing act: Women bus conductors are doing the job with as much ease as their male counterparts.

CHENNAI: They bring a bus overflowing with passengers to a halt with a whistle. But for the busy conductor of the Metropolitan Transport Corporation bus, that is just a fleeting moment of peace.

Unruly crowds, the heat and dust of the roads, and traffic jams delaying the journey make life difficult for the 8,000-odd bus conductors working with MTC.

At 5 p.m., the T.Nagar bus depot is swarming with people and the conductor of a bus on G18 route starts issuing tickets before the bus fills up.

Even then, by the time the bus reaches Saidapet, there are so many uncovered passengers that he has to stop the bus and put a stage to issue tickets.

The passengers, eager to reach home, start complaining about having to wait.

He says with buses having doors being introduced recently, the crowd was manageable, but even in these , passengers often bang the doors at signals to board.

Besides crowd management, conductors must also learn to act tough with ticketless travellers and pocket-pickers. S.Krishnan*, a cheery young man sporting yellow sandalwood paste on his forehead, is not as lenient as he appears to be.

When his 5A bus halts at Balaji Nagar bus stand, he watches out for a group of women who are notorious for not buying tickets. When they hop onto the bus and crowd near the door, he begins, “Yamma Vijaya, Kamala, ticketa edunga.”

As the women ignore him, he rolls his tongue in a menacing gesture and warns them that they are likely to be caught by ticket checking staff in the next stop.

Krishna says he does sympathise for poor people who cannot afford to buy tickets, but he wouldn’t let smart women take advantage of him.

D. Ramkumar, a conductor in buses originating from the High Court, says, “There are days when we have got beaten up by college students.”

He recalled an incident when a drunken student sat on the driver’s seat and refused to budge as several passengers waited to leave.

A fight ensued and the student ended up thrashing both the driver and the conductor, he said.

Some conductors stay put in their seats expecting passengers to buy tickets. Some also make a fuss about providing change to passengers. The MTC has started sending such conductors for refresher training courses.

A senior MTC official says that almost 200-300 conductors are being sent for the course every month. To reduce the high levels of stress they face during the job, the MTC has introduced yoga classes for them.

A male bastion until recently, women too are wielding the whistle in buses now.

R.Chitra, who works in the bus route 5B, says that she has learnt to deal with passengers softly.

“Unlike men, I don’t lose my patience easily.” But there is one thing she is yet to learn, without which her identity as a conductor is incomplete and that is to whistle, she says.

“Earlier I used to fall each time the driver applied the brakes, but I learnt the art of balancing from senior colleagues. Now I know how to quickly balance myself .”

The changing profile of MTC buses from teeth-chattering green boxes to hi-tech ones has also brought some degree of excitement among the staff, she says.

(* Names of some conductors have been changed on request)

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