In his first reaction to the issue, BEST Chairman Anil Patankar on Thursday intervened in the double decker scrapping debate raised by mid-day, and clarified that the bus numbers will not be brought down.

"I want to assure everyone that there is no plan to do away with double deckers. We may scrap older buses and a few routes here and there due to new bridges and flyovers, but I promise you that the number of double deckers in the fleet will remain the same," Anil Ramchandra Patankar told mid-day. "The ones scrapped will be replaced with new ones and the numbers will be kept the same," he said.