What’s the ‘point’ in KU buses?

KARACHI: The giant, green buses are not airconditioned and because there are never enough seats you are forced to hang out the door. But this definitely beats squeezing into a rickshaw and paying 60 rupees to get to Gulshan.

Getting to and from the Karachi University campus is for thousands of students, a choice between the broken buses and puttering rickshaws. Unless you have your own car to take you to Safoora Goth at the end of the city, your options are limited. This is why an estimated 22,000 students fight for a seat on 27 campus buses.

The point buses do not pick and drop students from their houses but run between ‘points’ or stops for which they charge low fares. One-way fare is three rupees, which is why students prefer them rather than public transport. Needless to say, 27 buses are not enough. Taking advantage of this weakness, the rickshaw ‘mafia’ have long exploited with higher fares.

KU transport chairman Professor Zulqarnain explains that their monthly budget of Rs200,000 is simply not enough either. He admitted that there was a dire need for more buses. “We’ve asked for [more] points but so far we just don’t have enough. We have too many students, only 3,000 students are able to use the service,” he added. Because the buses are so old, maintenance costs are also quite high.

The buses also have do double duty on campus to shuttle from one department to another. Here too, rickshaws have taken over to fill the void and make sure their fares are as high as possible.

Maria Husnain, a KU student, said, “There should be no rickshaws, they’re too expensive.” Small wonder then that KU students have long demanded a nonstop shuttle service. Student Amina argued that, “Students find it quite difficult, not everyone has a car and public buses are not allowed to come inside the campus, which is why it is necessary to have shuttles available.”

Buses are so overloaded that they tilt to one side as they speed along the roads of the city, a former KU student said, adding that it can get so suffocating inside that students have fainted. The points where the buses stop include places in Nazimabad, Malir and Gulshan, with the last point being FTC, which is the closest these buses get to Defence.

There have been a few reports of accidents involving KU buses as well, with the latest tragedy occurring last year in April. A second year student of the NED University of Engineering and Technology was crushed under a KU bus while trying to get off.

According to witnesses, the girl, Faiza Nadeem Zaidi, had missed her NED point bus and had hopped onto a KU bus. When her stop neared she tried to ask the driver to stop but he did not hear her. In the resulting confusion, Faiza had half jumped off the bus and was crushed beneath its wheels.

Published in The Express Tribune, July 8^th, 2010.