Aurangabad: The bus building capacity of the state transport's Central Workshop in Aurangabad district of Maharashtra has significantly gone down in the past five years due to shortage of manpower, an official said.
Financial crunch faced by the transport department has led to shortage of manpower at the workshop, which is one of the biggest central workshops of the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation (MSRTC) dealing with body building and maintenance of buses, he said.
Till five years back, nearly 60 aluminium-body buses used to be constructed every month at the workshop, located in Chikalthana area.
"But, now the workshop is able to build about 40 buses in a month. The major reason behind this is the declining manpower," the workshop's manager Sanjay Sangalikar told PTI.
Earlier, it used to take about 980 man hours to build a bus. But now, this has gone up to 1,170 man hours, he said.
The financial crunch has also affected the workshop's payment cycle, the official said.
Earlier, the workshop was committed to pay bills of procured parts in 30 days. But, now on an average it takes around 50 days to clear the payments of suppliers, he said.
Sanglikar said efforts are on to improve the functioning of the workshop.
"We have decided to enhance the capacity of bus building now by providing incentives to the available workforce in our workshop. We hope that in a year we will reach our earlier number of 60 bus constructions in a month," he said.
