In a famous act of judicial activism in 1998, the Supreme Court ordered that all diesel-run transport buses in Delhi should be converted to run on CNG, to curb air pollution. As a result, all public transport vehicles in the national Capital now run on the cleaner fuel.
Two decades later, the focus has shifted to making public transport buses disabled-friendly. This time, the Delhi High Court is at the helm.
Nipun Malhotra, who suffers from a locomotor disability, in September last year challenged the city government’s decision to procure standard-floor buses. Acting on his plea, the HC has stalled procurement of all such buses till further orders.
The Delhi government has requested the HC to allow it to procure 2,000 standard-floor buses citing acute shortage. The city has a fleet of 5,400 Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) and cluster buses, out of which 3,781 buses are low-floor, or disabled-friendly.
The city government claimed that with the procurement of another 2,000 buses, there would be 7,400 buses in the fleet. This, the government said, was in keeping in view the Centre’s guidelines that mandates only 10% of the buses need to be disabled-friendly.
Limited schedule
“Accepting the submission that only 10% of the buses are required to be made disabled-friendly would mean endorsement of the position that the disabled could follow no employment schedules. Their entire schedules are to be governed by the schedule of the 10% accessible public transport, which the DTC and the government are willing to provide,” the High Court had remarked.
“Procuring buses which are inaccessible to the disabled infracts the mandate of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities Act, 2016, and the imperative and repeated directions of the Supreme Court,” the court has told the government.
Between 2007-11, the DTC inducted 3,775 (2,500 non-AC and 1,275 AC) low-floor buses from funds provided by the Delhi government.
The government’s recent decision to press for standard-floor buses rests on the consideration that since 2011, no public transport bus tender has been awarded by the government. The DTC said that when it floated tenders for procuring low-floor buses, companies quoted unreasonable figures.
The HC has questioned why the government was limiting its tender to Indian companies and not exploring foreign ones. It is still seized of the matter with next hearing in August.
