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Roy had to be hospitalised at Ruby General Hospital on Saturday after being thrashed by a Calcutta State Transport Corporation (CSTC) bus conductor. The reason: He had asked the conductor for the fare chart when the conductor asked him to pay more than the regular fare.
He suffered two fractures on the middle and ring finger of his left hand and an injury on the right side of his face. The conductor, Bimal Barik, was later arrested by the Kasba police on charges of assault.
Like any other day, Koushik and his wife Moumita, residents of Teghoria from the northern fringes of the city was coming on a CSTC bus to Ruby Hospital. “Both of us take this route daily for work. For quite sometime we have been seeing that the bus conductors were taking different rates, some times Rs 8 or Rs 8.5 for travelling on the same route,” said Moumita.
The incident occurred around 9.15am, when the conductor of the MS-37 bus asked for Rs 17 for the two of them. Roy asked for the fare chart and the entire ruckus flared up when other passengers also raised their voice. “The conductor started a heated argument with my husband. He started misbehaving with us and used slangs,” said Moumita.
According to Moumita, as soon as the bus reached Ruby Hospital, the conductor hurriedly got down from the bus before the couple. “Suddenly, he caught my husband’s left hand and twisted his fingers before punching on his face,” she said.
The other passengers, meanwhile, stopped the bus and started beating up the driver till the traffic police rushed in and the driver was handed over to them.
Moumita’s father Mrinal Kanti Sarkar, a retired senior section engineer (electrical division) of South Eastern railway also rushed to join his daughter at the hospital and said, “What was encouraging was that the other passengers of the bus did not hesitate to raise their voice.”
Bad conductors of heat. Time to give them a lesson in good lawful conduct otherwise haul them up before their bosses for a good kick on their butts for gross professional misconduct and conduct further criminal inquiry in the incident and bring them before the court of law to face the charges of assault. A jail sentence would teach these people how to conduct themselves in public. It is obvious that these driver, conductor duo were making extra money by charging the passengers more than the correct fare and then pocketing the excess fare demanded by this criminal duo. The couple were fully justified in demanding to see the fare chart.
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