Getting buses on wet lease, converting a few into Liquified Natural Gas fuel (LNG) following the Kerala-model, a few into Compressed Natural Gas and turning some old buses into lorries to save costs and bring in revenue—this is how the Maharashtra State Road Transport Corporation, which has one of the biggest bus fleets in the country with 18,000 buses, is coping with lockdown losses.

As the lockdown led to almost bankruptcy, the MSRTC bosses, led by Maharashtra transport minister Anil Parab, who is the chairman of the corporation, last year decided to cut costs and listed several measures to make its operations across the state viable. They included route rationalisation, commercial exploitation of its land and increasing its freight movement by converting old buses into lorries, and following the Kerala model by abandoning diesel and converting a few of its buses into LNG-run vehicles.