Date:13/09/2006 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2006/09/13/stories/2006091315280400.htm

New Delhi

Bus stop highlights no coordination among Govt. departments

Gaurav Vivek Bhatnagar

Ideally DTC should start construction of bus shelters after discussing traffic flow with the traffic police

NEW DELHI: A new improperly planned bus stop constructed at Pandav Nagar here on National Highway-24 has once again brought to the fore lack of coordination among various departments of the Delhi Government. Within days of being erected with public money, the bus stop has been declared "not operational" by the Delhi traffic police and a board has been placed there stating that it has been "cancelled".

The construction of this bus shelter has shown the DTC in poor light as it should ideally be taking up construction of bus shelters only after discussing the traffic flow with the traffic police and other departments concerned. This has also forced a rethink on various other bus stops being constructed all over the Capital.

A senior Delhi Police officer said the new shelter had come up at a spot that had been a "No Stopping" and "No Parking" zone for a long time. "It had come up a few metres before the culvert over the Mother Dairy road in East Delhi on NH-24. On the culvert, the broad four-lane highway is reduced to a mere two lanes and the merging traffic always leads to long traffic jams during the rush hour."

Despite this situation being there for a long time, the DTC -- which knew of the facts well because its buses are also not allowed to stop anywhere near the top of the culvert -- still went ahead with the construction of the bus stop. Why the State Transport Department also did not bother to take the views of the traffic police is also a mystery.

The traffic police official said there was also no logic for this shelter as already such stop exists barely 100 metres away near Shri Oil Company filling station and on the road below the culvert near Mother Dairy.

Traffic chaos

To undo the wrong, the traffic police have now written to the DTC authorities to physically remove the bus shelter from the spot as it was encouraging buses to stop there and leading to traffic chaos.

"We now also place a traffic police personnel there during rush hours to ensure that no one stops there and have placed a board asking all buses to ignore the shelter and move on," the traffic police officer said.

The incident has once again highlighted that in Delhi coordination among official departments has still not improved despite several such instances in the past. In fact, an entire subway -- which had been constructed on Rafi Marg to connect Rail Bhavan to Krishi Bhavan -- had to be demolished for Delhi Metro construction barely months after it was commissioned. Likewise, several new toilet complexes, one of which had come up at the Sikandra Road-Tilak Marg intersection, had to be pulled down for Metro construction. This happened despite the Metro routes being known to the city planners since 1998.

The latest incident has come at a time when the New Delhi Municipal Council (NDMC) has been consulting the traffic police for its plans to install new bus shelters. "This just shows that the way the planning and its implementation progresses in Delhi is still something very person-centric and not institutionalised. The conduct of officials determines if a plan would work the right way," the traffic police officer lamented.