EFFECTIVENESS OF STATE TRANSPORT UNDERTAKINGS IN SELECTED STATES OF INDIA: USING THE DEA APPROACH

The purpose of this study is to examine the efficiency of public road transport in selected Indian states and furthermore, the study also provides an overview of the working status of state transport undertakings. Presently, there are around 62 state transport undertakings in India to cater to the requirements related to public transport. For extracting the efficiency of public road transport, the secondary data have been collected for ten states for the year 2018-19 and these are being seen as homogeneous units where public transport usage is high. Focusing on the public transport of these states, a complete analysis has been done through the Data Envelopment Analysis (DEA) technique with three specific inputs such as fleet size (FS), total staff (TS), fuel consumption (FC), and one basic output is bus utilization (BU). The study also highlights probable weaknesses and strengths of states' public transport. The Charness, Cooper, and Rhodes (CCR) and Banker, Chames, and Cooper (BCC) models of DEA have been employed to evaluate the overall technical efficiency (OTE), pure technical efficiency (PTE) and scale efficiency (SE). Scale efficiency is calculated with OTE and PTE scores which simply describe the size efficiency of decision- making units (DMUs). The Efficiency score of public transport in selected states revealed that during the year 2018-19, these states worked efficiently around 91 percent. Here input input-oriented model has been applied that’s why for making them efficient, inputs need to be reduced by 9 percent. Based on the efficiency score ranks are also assigned to the states.