By Express News Service HYDERABAD: In a freak incident, a temporary TSRTC driver abandoned a bus full of passengers — from Secunderabad via Hakimpet to Turkapally — late on Wednesday claiming his duty hours were over. A frantic passenger onboard Teja Arukoti, tweeted about how the driver had stopped the bus randomly at Hakimpet depot at 8:40 pm and asked all the passengers to deboard. He tagged the concerned authorities, including the city police, in his tweet. “I take this bus daily. I was shocked when the driver abandoned over 50 passengers in the middle of the road. While we began arguing, he just walked away. There was nothing we could do,” said Teja. Furthering the passengers’ worry, the conductor, who was not authorised to drive the bus, volunteered to take them to the destination. “We did not know what to do. We were stuck there and had no idea who to lodge a complaint with. We tweeted to no avail,” said Teja, adding that the road ahead had no street lights and their journey was dangerous to begin with. While the passengers reached their destinations safely, the whole incident exposed how unsafe and unregulated the ad hoc service provided by the TSRTC was. Previously, passengers had claimed that though the government said it had put 6,000 odd buses on roads every day, the actual number of buses were very few. This appears to be substantiated as the drivers have, on multiple occasions, abandoned trips midway. Sometimes, they do not run all the actual number of trips, and at other times they take long breaks, dramatically reducing the number of buses on the road. So, while 6,000 buses ply, not all of them are operative throughout the schedule. Meanwhile, RTC officials said that though there were inept hiccups, they were attempting to put together a skeleton of a public transport network for people. On Thursday, the 13th day of the strike, RTC plied 6,672 buses for the public.

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