Remember the Brihanmumbai Electricity Supply and Transport (BEST) undertaking’s Volvo fleet? That’s right, those six diesel-powered, single-door Volvo buses that were always covered in advertisements, mostly seen on AS-4 or Fort Pheri?
A little backstory here. In 2010, BEST had signed a deal with a firm named Asian Concierge, who would purchase 50 Volvo B7RLE buses and provide them to BEST in lieu of advertising rights on the body of the buses for 10 years. The first two buses were inducted November 2010, four more joined shortly after and that was that. The remaining 44 buses, which were to join BEST’s fleet by March 2011 never arrived.
The six buses were all housed at the Oshiwara Depot and mostly operated on AS-4 between Oshiwara Depot and Backbay Depot. Sometimes they operated on A-74Express from Oshiwara Depot to NSCI Worli (Nehru Planetarium/Lotus). Instead of idling at Backbay depot, they were often deployed on Fort Pheri-1 AC that ran in a circle in and around Fort.
BEST’s fleet strength at that time was near 4,700 buses, which included the 272 (in)famous Cerita fleet. According to Sanjay Potnis, then chairman of the BEST committee, BEST did not purchase any Volvo buses as they did not have the budget for it.
When BEST scrapped all AC routes in 2017, all of them including the Volvo fleet was grounded. If you want to read a bit of history on what led to the AC fleet to be grounded, do read these two articles, both authored by me:
The curious case of BEST and its AC buses
The ‘BEST’ scamster Indians should know about – Congress and the Khobragades have a lot to explain
Since 2017, these buses were just lying at Oshiwara Depot. A photo of them in a dilapidated condition appeared on some busfanning groups in 2021 but I was unable to secure permission to use them publicly.
The six buses that were housed at Oshiwara were:
2705/OSH (MH-46-J-0083)
2703/OSH (MH-46-J-0024)
2706/OSH (MH-46-J-0084)
2701/OSH (MH-46-J-0020)
2702/OSH (MH-46-J-0023)
2704/OSH (MH-46-J-0081)
All photographs and even Google Earth footage showed only four buses parked at the Oshiwara Depot. On a side note, Google Earth is now limited historical imagery of India to 2017-2018 while imagery of the years before that is available for other countries.
In March 2023 (two months ago), it emerged that at least two of the six buses had been junked. Fellow busfan Swapnil Patil posted two photographs of 2705/OSH and 2703/OSH at a scrap yard in Taloja. You can see the images below:
These two photographs really break my heart. These buses were barely 13 years old and could have run for their full fifteen years. The disastrous double fare hike of 2015 made AC buses more expensive that auto-rickshaws in the city and the 2016 rollback, while successful was too little, too late. Asian Concierge seems to have gone under liquidation, and I can’t seem to find the original firm on Tofler, although there is an Asian Concierge Transport that was incorporated in 2016.
That’s all from me for now. Let’s hope common sense hits BEST soo and they increase their now drastically dwindling fleet of buses as quickly as possible.
Featured Image: BEST AS-4 at Mahim (Photo: Srikanth Ramakrishnan/BESTpedia)
