City to get 1,500 more low-floor buses soon

To stimulate urban management, the Central government will approve proposals to sanction 5,000 new buses for 63 major cities of India, including Delhi, and projects worth Rs 11,000 crore for construction of roads and civic amenities in a week's time.

Updated on: Feb 27, 2009, 23:41:31 IST

Hindustan Times | By Chetan Chauhan, New Delhi

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To stimulate urban management, the Central government will approve proposals to sanction 5,000 new buses for 63 major cities of India, including Delhi, and projects worth Rs 11,000 crore for construction of roads and civic amenities in a week's time.

The decision has the twin objective of providing stimulus to automobile and construction industry and to reduce urban pollution.

Delhi, which has already introduced low-floor buses, will get 1,500 more buses in the next few months, said Planning Commission secretary Subhas Pani on Friday.

It is for the first time that funds have been allocated to Delhi for buses under the Jawaharlal Nehru Urban Renewal Mission (JNURM). Delhi has over 1,000 non-air-conditioned and air-conditioned low floor buses in the city already. “The money given to Delhi is for special city-specific low floor buses,” Pani said.

Mumbai will get 700 buses whereas 150 bses for Navi Mumbai and 200 buses for Thane have been approved. The government has also approved 700 buses for Bangalore, 1,200 for Kolkatta, 700 for Hyderabad and 800 for Chennai. “By June 2009, the buses would be on road,” Pani said. The approvals would be based on a recent Cabinet decision to initiate a new scheme of Rs 2,000 crore to provide modern buses to 63 cities listed under the JNURM.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR
Chetan Chauhan
Chetan Chauhan is the National Affairs Editor looking into all aspects of news and features from across India. A Chevening scholar with over three decades of experience in reporting and news management, Chetan has extensively covered all important aspects of the social sector, political economy, environment and climate change nationally and internationally. He did a journalism course at the Reuters Institute of Journalism in Oxford and Digital Media training at Nanyang Technological University in Singapore. He started as a reporter with The Statesman in 1996 and joined the Hindustan Times in 2000 in the metro bureau covering environment, crime and Delhi politics. He covered hot local news, from the Jessica Lal murder case to the rebellion of Delhi Congress MLAs against then Chief Minister Sheila Dikshit, to the replacement of toxic vehicle fuel with cleaner compressed natural gas (CNG) in the national capital. Some of his stories on air pollution became part of the Supreme Court’s landmark MC Mehta versus Government of India case in the National Capital Region (NCR), forcing the government to take corrective measures. As part of the national political bureau since 2004, he covered important central sectors such as environment, education, social justice, labour, rural development, water resources, renewable energy, agriculture, broadcasting and the Planning Commission for more than a decade producing several exclusive and investigative breaking stories. His specialisation is the environment, having covered at least a dozen United Nations global conferences on climate change, biodiversity and wildlife including climate summits in Paris, Copenhagen and Bali. He also covered India’s two five-year plans ---11th and 12th and reported on drafting and execution of right based laws such as Right to Education, Right to Information and rural job guarantee law, MG-NREGA, now being introduced in new format as VG-RAM-G Act. He has in-depth knowledge of social sector issues. He was one of the first to report on tigers vanishing from Sariska and Panna wildlife reserves in 2004 and 2008, respectively, leading to the setting up of the National Tiger Conservation Authority (NTCA) and the introduction of stringent penal provisions for poaching. He has written extensively on the rising human-animal conflict in India and the degradation of India’s biodiversity hotspots because of mining and other activities. Since 2004, Chetan has covered Parliament comprehensively and participated in training on the nuanced coverage of Parliament proceedings. He has travelled extensively across India to cover national and provincial elections since 1998, especially in the Hindi heartland states, considered India’s road to power. He writes a regular column for Hindustan Times, Ecostani, on important national politics, economy, Himalayan ecology and environmental issues. His other responsibilities include providing inputs for edits and edit page articles for the publication, apart from managing news flow from across India.Read More

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