PERFORMANCE EVALUATION OF ROAD TRANSPORT CORPORATIONS

Abstract

Performance statistics of State Transport Undertakings (STUs) published by Association of State Road Transport Under-takings (ASRTU) has been used in this work to conduct perfor-mance evaluation of thirty two Indian STUs. Most of the under-takings are operating both the city service and interurban service in varying proportions. In all seventeen performance variables were selected for the analysis at the first instance. Classical factor analysis reduced the problem domain in three orthogonal directions. The three extracted factors obtained through Varimax Rotation ,were, Bus efficiency, service e effectiveness and cost efficiency. The three factors accounted for about 89 percent variance. To reduce the complexity of analsyis, these thirty two STUs were disaggregated into four, more or less, homogeneous groups through Hierarchical Clustering Analysis. In all four variables namely, 'Vehicle kms per active vehicle, vehicle kms per operating expenses, passenger per operating expenses and operating revenue per operating expenses were considered for clustering analysis. Due to their unique performance, three STUs namely;BEST, Haryana S.T. and Calcutta S.T.0 could not be assigned to any of the four groups. The validity of grouping scheme was tested through Multiple Discri-minant Analysis (MDA). Some cases of misclassification were revealed and those STUs were assigned to their proper groups. The validity of grouping scheme as emerged out of MDA was further tested through one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA). The computed F-values provided 95 percent level of confidence in the grouping scheme on six variables namely, vehicle kms per employee, vehicle kms per active vehicle, vehicle kms per maintenance employee, vehicle kms per operating expenses, operating revenue per operating expenses and total revenue per total expenses. However, two variables passenger trips per (iv) revenue vehicle kms and passengers per operating expenses could not be helpful in group separation. Between group performance on all the eight variables revealed clearcut performance variations. The possible reasons within group performance variations were also identified. Also the performance evaluation of the three unaffiliated STUs has been carried out separately to show their uniqueness.