TGSRTC doesn’t maintain records of accidents involving its buses: RTI response

The latest road accident in which a lorry — reportedly driving on the wrong side of the road — crashing into a Telangana State Road Transport Corporation (TGSRTC) bus carrying several passengers that led to at least 19 deaths, has laid bare the concern of transparency and sharing data.

Data sought under the Right to Information Act (RTI) connected to the number of road accidents in which TGSRTC buses were involved elicited a strange response from the state road transport undertaking: “It is regretted to express our inability to provide information as sought in the application.”

The TGSRTC cited an order of the Supreme Court in the CBSE Vs Aditya Bandopadhyaya case in which the ruling, per the transport behemoth, was that “where the information sought is not a part of the record of a public authority and where such information is not required to be maintained under any law or the rules and regulations of public authority, the Act does not cast an obligation upon the public authority to collect or collate such non-available information and furnish it to the applicant. A public authority is not required to furnish information which require drawing of inferences and/or making of assumptions.”

“The reply is dated October 24, 2025. I had sought information on the number of accidents in which TGSRTC buses were involved. I had merely suggested a format in which yearly data be provided along with number of accidents, number of fatalities, injuries, among other aspects such as the fate of victims. If the other details were not available, upholding the spirit of the Act was important. Just the information about the number of accidents each year could have been supplied,” said applicant Kareem Ansari, who filed the plea.

Interestingly, in 2022, former RTC Board Director M. Nagesgwar Rao obtained similar details through RTI Act. The state-run corporation had said that from 2017-18 to 2020-21, its buses were involved in as many as 2,674road accidents . The response further stated that “total number of deaths of roads users/passengers/other vehicle users” stood at 1,230 during the same period. Of these, as many as 183 were of passengers, and 283 were pedestrians. Furthermore, around ₹150 crore was paid in compensation during that period.

With the TGSRTC then grappling with crushing losses on account of diesel price hikes, compounded with the aftermath of the COVID – 19 pandemic and the lockdown that forced buses to go off the roads found it difficult to pay compensation. An measure to offset this, the transport juggernaut introduced a safety cess of ₹1 per passenger since 2022 so as to build a corpus to pay compensation.