Nagpur’s Polluting MSRTC Buses Keep Running Amid Delays and Policy Gaps

thenewsdirt
Jul 31
10 min read

Nagpur, the largest city of the Vidarbha region, greets many commuters each day with the rumble of decades-old red buses operated by the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC).

These ageing diesel buses chug through traffic emitting thick exhaust, even as the city grapples with deteriorating air quality. Over the past five years, officials have repeatedly flagged these vehicles for their high pollution levels, yet they remain a mainstay on Nagpur’s roads.

Observers note that promises of cleaner, newer buses have been slow to materialise, leaving residents to wonder why obsolete, polluting buses are still ferrying passengers across the city and its surrounding districts.

An Ageing Fleet and the Pollution Problem

For many commuters in and around Nagpur, using MSRTC’s iconic “Lal Pari” buses means boarding vehicles well past their prime. Around 10,000 of MSRTC’s 16,000 buses statewide are over a decade old.

Some have even surpassed 15 years in service, a threshold after which vehicles are known to emit significantly higher levels of pollutants.

Transport department data indicate that the Nagpur division alone has tens of thousands of vehicles older than 15 years still plying on the roads. Many of these are heavy diesel vehicles like buses and trucks, which are major contributors to the city’s pollution. Environmental officials have long warned that such ageing diesel engines discharge excessive soot and noxious gases, worsening urban smog and public health risks.

Commuters regularly witness the effects of this ageing fleet. It is not uncommon to see an MSRTC bus belching black smoke as it departs Nagpur’s busy Mor Bhavan terminus or navigates a village road in Vidarbha. Passengers describe some of these buses as uncomfortable and poorly maintained. “The bus was so dirty and smelly that we had a very hard time travelling to our destination,” recalled Shailesh Charthankar, a student who rode an old MSRTC bus recently.

Others have reported broken air conditioners and even cracked windshields on these vehicles. Such conditions not only make travel arduous but also hint at mechanical neglect, which often correlates with higher emissions. A poorly tuned engine or an old exhaust system can dramatically increase the release of particulate matter. In Nagpur’s streets, the sight of an overaged bus trailing visible exhaust fumes has become a familiar, if worrying, sight for residents and traffic police alike.

Government authorities are acutely aware of the pollution problem posed by overaged public transport.

In fact, regulations on paper forbid such prolonged use. Commercial diesel buses in highly polluted cities are ideally meant to be phased out after about 8 to 10 years of service. Mumbai, for instance, has observed court orders barring diesel buses older than eight years from regular service due to air quality concerns.

Yet in Nagpur and much of Maharashtra, enforcement of age limits has been lax. Buses and heavy vehicles older than 15 years are officially “not allowed” to operate, but authorities admit that many continue to run due to weak monitoring.

An emission inventory study of Nagpur identified vehicular exhaust, especially from older diesel engines, as one of the major sources of the city’s pollution, alongside industrial emissions. In other words, these ageing MSRTC buses are directly contributing to Nagpur’s polluted environment every day.

Delayed Upgrades and Policy Gaps

If the pollution and breakdown problems are so evident, why are these old buses still on the road? A key reason is the slow pace of fleet replacement and chronic funding shortfalls.

The past five years have been turbulent for MSRTC’s finances and operations. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the state transporter’s plan to buy new buses came to a standstill.

A prolonged employees’ strike in 2021–22 further crippled maintenance schedules and drained resources, leaving many buses in disrepair. By 2023, MSRTC had accumulated losses of around ₹8,000 crore, making large-scale procurement of vehicles difficult.

According to Shekhar Channe, the MSRTC’s vice-chairman and managing director, virtually no new buses were purchased for three years due to the pandemic and other disruptions. The result was a rapidly ageing fleet with few replacements coming in, a situation that forced the corporation to keep using old coaches well past their intended life span.

Government policy itself has sent mixed signals regarding scrapping old buses. The Union road transport ministry announced that from April 2023, all government-owned vehicles over 15 years old, including state transport buses, must be deregistered and scrapped.

However, implementing this mandate has proven easier said than done. Several states were initially hesitant to scrap their transport corporation buses on schedule, citing the financial burden of buying new buses to replace them. Maharashtra is among the states that have struggled with this transition. Officials privately acknowledge that retiring hundreds of old buses without immediate replacements would severely hamper connectivity in regions like Vidarbha, where MSRTC services are a lifeline between remote towns.

Thus, despite the central policy, many older buses were given an extended lease of life by necessity. The “green tax,” meant to penalise vehicles older than 15 years, has seen sluggish enforcement; owners of over 16 lakh old vehicles in Maharashtra have evaded these environmental taxes over the past decade.

In effect, regulatory pressure to retire polluting buses has been weak, allowing MSRTC to keep running them to meet passenger demand.

Another factor has been delays in the rollout of cleaner alternatives. MSRTC had drawn up plans to modernise its fleet with greener technology, but those plans have moved slowly on the ground in Nagpur.

In 2019, the corporation began overhauling some older buses by replacing their old aluminium bodies with sturdier steel bodies, a retrofit intended to extend the service life of buses by several years.

This move improved safety but did nothing to curb emissions. The modified buses saw a minor drop in fuel efficiency, meaning they burned more diesel per kilometre.

More recently, MSRTC announced ambitious steps toward cleaner buses: the agency is in the process of procuring a total of 5,000 electric buses and converting another 5,000 old diesel buses to run on liquefied natural gas (LNG) in the next few years. These plans, if fully realised, could dramatically cut pollution. Yet for Nagpur and the Vidarbha region, the benefits remain largely aspirational at present.

A case in point is the much-publicised introduction of electric “Shivai” buses. In mid-2022, MSRTC launched its first electric bus on a pilot route, and it contracted a firm to supply 5,000 electric buses statewide, including 228 earmarked for the Nagpur division.

However, as of early 2024, that contractor had delivered only 20 e-buses in total, none of which were deployed in Nagpur’s region.

The delay in deliveries has directly affected routes in Nagpur, which still await their promised electric fleet. Charging infrastructure was supposed to be set up across Maharashtra, but progress has been halting; for example, work to install charging stations at Nagpur’s Imambada depot only began once it became clear the buses were behind schedule.

This sluggish implementation of cleaner technology means Nagpur’s commuters continue riding in older diesel buses for now, with little immediate relief from exhaust fumes. “To reduce the impact of air pollution, the state government has plans to transform its fleet from diesel to electric buses shortly,” an MSRTC official told local media, yet the gap between plans and reality remains wide on the city’s streets.

Even conventional bus replacement has lagged. At a press conference in Nagpur in late 2024, MSRTC officials acknowledged the fleet had shrunk from about 18,000 buses before 2018 to just 14,000 in service, as old buses went out without equivalent new additions.

To address the shortage, MSRTC’s chairman announced that 3,500 new buses would be inducted in 2025 – 2,200 new purchases and 1,300 on lease. These 3,500 buses, he said, would start joining the fleet from January 2025 to replace ageing vehicles and reduce frequent breakdowns.

However, until those buses arrive and fan out to depots in Nagpur and beyond, the old ones must soldier on. The corporation has been scrapping roughly 1,000 obsolete buses each year, but that pace barely keeps up with ageing, given the majority of the fleet is already over 10 years old. In practice, MSRTC has also resorted to refurbishing buses that are around 7–8 years old by rebuilding them, effectively prolonging their life by several years.

While this refurbishment can make an old bus “as good as new” in terms of structure, it leaves the old engine in place. Officials insist that “pollution norms are taken care of” and only buses that have truly completed their service life are discarded.

Yet the presence of visibly high-emitting buses on Nagpur roads suggests that many vehicles past their prime are indeed still running, likely until a replacement is available at that specific depot.

Vidarbha’s Concerns and Official Response

Residents and environmental advocates in Vidarbha have grown increasingly critical of the status quo. Nagpur’s air quality, while better than Delhi’s, has shown signs of decline with rising levels of particulate matter in recent years.

Many locals point out that the pollution from vehicles is not just an abstract statistic. It is something they breathe in daily. “Pollution levels in the city had reached an unprecedented level,” a government committee noted as far back as 2000, and that warning resonates today when one follows an old MSRTC bus spewing diesel smoke near Nagpur’s Sitabuldi junction.

Concerned citizens have questioned why authorities allow these ageing buses to operate without stricter checks. Under current rules, every commercial vehicle is supposed to undergo annual fitness tests and carry a valid Pollution Under Control (PUC) certificate. In practice, however, enforcement is patchy.

A tragic incident in 2023 underscored this issue: a private bus that caught fire on the Nagpur-Mumbai Expressway, killing 25 passengers, was found to have obtained a clean PUC certificate just hours after the accident, raising suspicions of rubber-stamp inspections.

While that was a private operator and an extreme case, it highlighted a broader culture of lax oversight that can extend to state buses as well. Activists argue that without rigorous emission testing, many MSRTC buses likely operate with emissions far above legal limits, especially if their engines and filters are not maintained.

Commuters, too, are voicing frustration. What was once a proud public transport system has, according to some, deteriorated noticeably. “Just five to six years ago, the MSRTC bus service was comfortable. Things have just changed for the worse,” one regular passenger observed, lamenting the decline in bus conditions.

He and others accuse the state government of neglecting the transport corporation, pointing to the lack of improvements and even basic data transparency. MSRTC, for instance, does not publicly share breakdown statistics for its buses, which passengers suspect is because the numbers would be embarrassing.

Breakdowns and delays are not only an inconvenience; they hint that vehicles might be on the verge of mechanical failure, operating without optimal engines or exhaust systems, thereby contributing more to pollution. “Many transport bodies faced the same situation, but they have improved. Why can't the old buses be repaired until the new buses come?” asked Srikant Pawar, a professional who frequently travels between cities.

His question captures the sentiment of many Vidarbha commuters: even if new buses are on the way, the present condition of the fleet feels inexcusable. Riders are essentially stuck with ageing, high-polluting buses for their daily needs, and they want to know why interim measures, like overhauling engines or stricter maintenance, haven’t made a difference in the meantime.

On the official front, the MSRTC management and government authorities acknowledge the problems but urge patience. They often cite the upcoming improvements and the scale of the challenge. Shekhar Channe (MSRTC’s managing director) has emphasised that replacing an ageing fleet is a top priority and that thousands of new buses, including electric and CNG models, are in the pipeline. In public statements, MSRTC officials stress that every year, older buses are being phased out gradually and that environmental norms are being adhered to as much as possible.

The fact remains, however, that tangible relief is slow to reach Nagpur’s streets. When pressed, officials often point out external hurdles.

The corporation’s deputy general manager cited the supplier’s delay in delivering electric buses as a major setback in rolling out cleaner vehicles in Nagpur. State transport department officers also mention that they are conducting drives to check the fitness of old vehicles and will crack down on those unfit for roads. Yet these assurances ring hollow for many residents who have heard similar promises in the past.

In the meantime, local authorities have taken some smaller steps to mitigate pollution. The Nagpur Municipal Corporation, which runs the city’s separate urban bus service, has begun scrapping its own decade-old diesel city buses and adopting electric buses under central government schemes.

This city-level transition toward cleaner public transport underscores the contrast with the state-run MSRTC buses, which serve the wider Vidarbha region. While Nagpur’s city buses are gradually getting greener, a large portion of regional travellers still ride in vehicles from another era.

Transport experts note that these old long-haul buses not only pollute more but also consume more fuel and are prone to breakdowns, making them both environmentally and economically inefficient. “Mumbai needs buses with better technology and not old ones,” transport expert Ajit Shenoy remarked during a debate on phasing out aged buses, a statement equally applicable to Nagpur and other cities.

The consensus among experts is that clinging to outdated vehicles is a poor bargain, trading short-term service continuity for long-term costs to public health and the climate.

Awaiting a Cleaner Future

As things stand, Nagpur’s reliance on old MSRTC buses continues out of necessity rather than choice. Each morning, travellers from surrounding towns line up at bus stops, fully aware that the approaching MSRTC bus might be an overworked old model coughing up smoke.

They board anyway, because for many communities in Vidarbha, these are the only affordable links to the city. The state government insists that help is on the horizon in the form of new buses and greener technology.

Indeed, if MSRTC follows through on adding 3,500 new buses in 2025 and accelerating its electric bus program, Nagpur could finally see the retirement of its most polluting coaches in the near future.

Until those promises materialise, however, the city and its hinterland remain caught in an uncomfortable status quo. Citizens breathe unhealthy emissions from ageing buses, and officials balance on a tightrope, trying to keep public transport running with old vehicles while knowing those very vehicles undermine the fight against pollution.

Commuters and environmentalists alike are watching closely, hoping that the next time they see a bus with the MSRTC logo, it will be a cleaner, newer model rather than the same smoke-belching workhorses of years past.

Nagpur’s struggle with its ageing buses encapsulates a broader challenge faced by many Indian cities of modernising public transport in time to curb pollution. The city’s residents have endured the fumes and delays long enough, they hope that a cleaner, quieter fleet will soon turn from an elusive goal into a concrete change on the roads of Vidarbha’s hub.