Date:29/12/2007 URL: http://www.thehindu.com/2007/12/29/stories/2007122957510400.htm

New Delhi

2,900 Blueline buses to be phased out by June 2009

Staff Reporter

‘The Delhi Government was dragging its feet over removing the Blueline buses’
‘There are 3,800 Blueline buses and it would not be prudent to remove all of them at once’

NEW DELHI: Looking after the Transport Department in the absence of Transport Minister Haroon Yusuf, Education Minister Arvinder Singh defended the Government’s stand on the Blueline buses in the Delhi Assembly on Friday saying that 2,900 of these buses would be phased out by June 2009 as the problem was not with their colour but the competitive nature in which they are run by individual operators.

Standing up firmly to the charge by Leader of Opposition Jagdish Mukhi that Blueline buses had already taken 116 lives this year and yet the Delhi Government was dragging its feet over removing them, Mr. Singh said since there are 3,800 Blueline buses in Delhi that operate on 346 routes it would not be prudent to take them off the roads all at once.

The Minister said a scheme for phasing out these buses has been formulated as it was found that their major problem was that they raced against each other. Their permits, he said, are only being extended for four months at a time on a temporary basis.

Now, he said, 17 clusters have been identified across Delhi, where groups that had responded to the expression of interest floated by the Government and offered to run more than 100 buses each would be invited to run buses along with Delhi Transport Corporation.

Mr. Singh said the DTC fleet would also be strengthened with the addition of 1,000 more buses in 2008 and it would be 6,000-strong by 2010. By then there would be an adequate number of buses on all the 657 routes.

To have an efficient public transport system, he said, the High Capacity Bus System was also being promoted and this would also have separate lanes for pedestrians and scooterists. Further, monitoring of buses through the Global Positioning System would be undertaken.

He said the first phase of the HCBS would start in July 2008.

On the issue of compensation for road deaths involving buses, Mr. Singh said a uniform policy had not been evolved so far because many a time the buses were not at fault.

“Sometimes the pedestrians and scooterists are at fault,” he reasoned.