Bharatiya Janata Party (BJP) State president Manoj Tiwari on Monday took on both the incumbent Aam Aadmi Party (AAP) government and the one led by Congress’ Sheila Dikshit, for getting the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) on the verge of “breakdown”.
Reacting to The Hindu ’s report on Monday on the current fleet size of the DTC being the lowest in a decade and the possibility of standard-floor buses being phased out completely this year, Mr. Tiwari blamed Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal’s government for “callousness” and charged Ms. Dikshit with “unplanned working” related to what he termed was the “backbone of Delhi’s public transport system”.
‘Transport to collapse’
“The DTC is on a verge of breakdown which will ultimately lead to collapse of city’s public transport in the next two to three years. It is due to negligence and non-performance of the Kejriwal government that there has been no purchase of buses,” Mr. Tiwari alleged.
“The shelving of buses which have outlived their utility has brought the number of buses in DTC down to 3,882. Out of these, hardly 3,100 buses are operational on any given day against the requirement of around 11,000 buses in the city,” Mr. Tiwari said, adding that in the next two years, over 100 “old normal buses” of the DTC and 700 low-floor buses will go off the road. He said that the AAP government has no plan to replace these buses as of now, with all its concentration on buying exorbitantly priced and untested 1,000 electric buses.
“Even if we assume 1,000 electric buses will come on road by 2020, that would only replace the present CNG buses, thus offering no solution towards augmenting the DTC fleet to meet the needed demand for 11,000 buses...Around 700 DTC buses still remain off the road which is the biggest cause reason behind commuters’ hardship and revenue loss for DTC itself,” he alleged.
He also said that the DTC had no in-house maintenance system and for every petty repair it “looks towards private service provider”.
“DTC must be the only bus service in the world with no effective internal workshop today. No doubt, the policy framed by the erstwhile Sheila Dikshit government giving maintenance contracts to the bus suppliers at exorbitant costs is responsible for the present situation. However, sadly the Kejriwal government too has made no effort to develop in-house maintenance,” he alleged.
