Jamshedpur: Passengers faced tough times today as private long distance buses went on a day-long strike to protest administration move to demolish makeshift kiosks selling tickets at the long distance bus terminus in Sitaramdera on Friday.
The Sitaramdera bus terminus on an average caters to over 100 long-distance buses that that head for places such as Ranchi, Dhanbad, Bokaro and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and Bengal, Odisha and Bihar.
Later in the evening at around 5 pm a talk between bus owners and local urban body Jamshedpur Notified Area Committee was held and the strike was called off at around 5.30 pm. However, bus service will resume from Saturday early morning (4.30 am).
Jamshedpur Bus Owners Welfare Association patron, Upender Sharma expressed concern over the problems for the passengers but said that they were compelled to resort to such a strike.
�We had no choice left but to observe strike. The administration has been creating pressure on us like never before. There is no counters for selling tickets and the bus operators had arranged makeshift kiosks to sell it for customers. But these are being demolished. The bus operators were also harassed for no reasons like parking outside the terminus. They should first provide us facilities before resorting to such acts,� said Upender Sharma.
Nearly, 30,000 passengers take around 400 buses leaving the terminus daily for various destinations in Jharkhand, Bihar, Bengal, Uttar Pradesh and Odisha from the terminus spread on nearly 1.5 acre of land.
�We had read about the strike in the paper but we never knew that the impact of the strike would be so wide. I could not go to Patna for an urgent work. The job will be done tomorrow,� said Rajesh Sahu a resident of Jugsalai.
The Sitaramdera bus terminus on an average caters to over 400 long-distance buses that that head for places such as Ranchi, Dhanbad, Bokaro and Hazaribagh in Jharkhand and Bengal, Odisha and Bihar.