The Delhi government has been given a deadline of December, 2018, to increase the number of buses in the Capital's fleet to 10,000. The measure is expected to cut down pollution in the city.
The programme, for which the deadline has been set for by the Environment Pollution- Prevention and Control Authority (EPCA), is awaiting clearance from the Supreme Court (SC). The Apex Court had asked the EPCA to resubmit the report that it had tabled in March, after arming it with a clear timeline for the implementation of the proposed measures. Once the SC clears the revised report, it would have to be notified by the Centre.
"The Delhi government must ensure total compliance with the orders of 1998 and 2016 by December, 2018. This requires a total fleet of at least 10,000 buses," read the report.
This is not the first time that the proposal to augment the city's bus fleet has been taken up. The matter goes back to 1998 and 2016, when the SC directed the Delhi government to speed up bringing in more buses to its fleet. This is the first time, however, that the government has been given a clear deadline.
Recently, the AAP government had initiated the process to procure 2,000 CNG buses (1,000 for DTC and 1,000 for the cluster scheme) by next year. According to the data available with the transport department, the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) has an existing fleet of 3,944 buses at the moment. The DTC has not added a single new bus to its number since 2010. On the other hand, the Delhi Integrated Multimodal Transit System (DIMTS) runs 1,634 buses under the cluster scheme.
The combined strength of buses is around 5,600. It means that apart from procuring 2,000 new buses, the Delhi government will have to purchase as many as 3,400 more buses to meet the target set under the comprehensive action plan.
The scheme was initiated by the Sheila Dikshit government acting on a blueprint in 2012 and a 42-point action plan of the Central Pollution Control Board (CPCB) and the Delhi Master Plan 2021, among others. The programme takes into account medium, long-term and short-term measures, to arrest pollution through 13 key pollutants as identified by an IIT-Kanpur study.
