Sri. Upendra Tripathy receives PM Excellence award

Karnataka-cadre 1980 batch IAS officer Upendra Tripathy is among the officials who have bagged the Prime Minister's Award for Excellence. Tripathy, 52, gets the award for steering Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) as India's only profit-making urban transport undertaking as its key driver for more than five years before he picked a position with the Central government's ministry of tribal affairs in New Delhi last month. Driving profit: The popular BMTC bus on Bangalore roads. Photo: Stephen David BMTC recorded just a small 0.14 accidents per one lakh km rate, the lowest in India. Tripathy used to have his regular janata darshans for his employees where grievances would be immediately be attended to: from an injured driver seeking a desk job to a pregnant lady conductor asking for liberal extension of leave with pay.

The award winning officer also ensured that BMTC had tied up with nearly thirty big hospitals. Staff children got free tuition. He fit more than 1,200 buses - of the 4,700 with BMTC - with GPS device to know where the buses were. He has worked on a PhD on political economy of India 's ozone management policy at Carleton University, Ottawa. Taking a leaf from Lalu Prasad who talked of milking the Jersey cows to the maximum to ensure the maximum profits, Tripathy also worked his fleet to the max -- at 94 per cent highest fleet utilisation in the country - driving a profit of Rs 200-odd crore last year. Just before leaving for Delhi, Tripathy also prepared the ground for the BMTC to go for an initial public offer that will fetch the company about Rs 5,000 crore. The economic downturn has delayed the IPO process.

He is an ardent advocate of mass transport. As he told India Today earlier, "One bus can keep nearly forty cars off the roads and cities must have dedicated bus lanes called Bus Rapid Transit corridor." The environmentalist in him also ensured that the Kyoto Protocol is also applicable for the BMTC buses - earning Certified Emission Reduction (CER) by using bio-diesel in 280 of its buses to start with. For the uninitiated, the Kyoto Protocol is an international agreement, negotiated in Kyoto, Japan, in December 1997, by which industrialised nations have committed to making substantial reductions in their emissions of greenhouse gases by 2012. More than 160 countries have committed to the agreement thus far. If all its 4,700 buses run on bio-diesel, BMTC will earn US$1.9 million a year through carbon trade. It will also need a whopping 1.46 lakh MT of bio-diesel. Tripathy hopes that BMTC's model of success can be replicated in other metros. BMTC buses ply a million km today carrying three million passengers daily.