Testing Times For Karur Bus Body Industry

One of the largest clusters of bus body building in South India, Karur caters to a wide customer base in the peninsular region extending up to Maharashtra and Orissa, along with Andaman Islands.

- Dhiyanesh Ravichandran

Ever since its emergence in the 1980s, the town’s bus fabrication industry has stood up to changing times, although the disruptive scenario in the last five years has hurt it so badly beyond any imminent recovery. MOTORINDIA investigates a multitude of factors that lead to the downtrend and figure out the way forward towards resumption and growth of the industry.

I grew up in a tiny town situated some 17 km north of Karur in Tamil Nadu along the National Highway 44 (previously NH 7), the longest running highway connecting the north and south extremes of the country. Being situated on the path of NH has brought a lot of prosperity to the Karur district which can be considered the central point of the State of Tamil Nadu. Since my home was highway-facing, just yards away from it, I naturally became a connoisseur of road and the vehicles plying on it!

Karur, representing the entrepreneurial spirit of the central region of Tamil Nadu, is a major hub of textile manufacturing, bus body fabrication and commercial agriculture. These activities kept the highway even more busy, and what always caught my attention at that time were those newly-built buses leaving Karur. That was the time when the local bus body builders got a lot of inter-State orders, and the new buses had to use the then two-lane highway to return back to their home State. They usually moved as a convoy of three or more buses and frequently stopped at my doorstep for a break.

Further, my relation with Karur-built buses goes beyond connoisseurship. I also grew up travelling in those buses all long, may it be for my everyday school commute, week-end trips to kins in the neighbouring districts, or even inter-State transit. Buses were like ‘dreamliners’ for middle-class folks like us until we started owning a car, and they actually looked like one! Even today, buses built in Karur have a unique flavour of their own, in terms of styling and customisation.