The Delhi Transport Corporation may induct 100 more electric buses in its fleet by the end of March or the first week of April, officials said on Sunday. The new buses will take the electric bus fleet of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) to 400. Delhi Transport Commissioner Ashish Kundra recently visited Tata Motors’ Lucknow plant to inspect the buses. Last month, DTC MD Shilpa Shinde visited Karnataka to oversee the prototype model. “We will get 100 electric buses by the end of March or first week of April. After that 200-250 buses will come every month.”
“A DTC team had gone to Karnataka to see the prototype. It has been approved and now we have come to the manufacturing plant in Lucknow for a formal inspection of the buses,” said an official. Equipped with safety features like CCTV cameras and panic buttons, these buses will hit the roads of the national capital in the next three to four weeks after the configuration and registration process is followed, he added.
The 100 new electric buses will be the first of 1,500 that will be inducted into the Department for Transport’s fleet by the end of 2023, bringing their total to 1,800. Flagging off electric buses in January, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal said that 80 per cent of Delhi’s total fleet would be electric by the end of 2025.
Sharing the roadmap for procurement of electric buses, he had said that the government would buy 1,500 such vehicles in 2023. By 2025, 6,380 electric buses will be purchased. There are around 7,200 buses plying on the city roads – DTC operates 3,900 buses and the cluster operates 3,300 buses. At the same time, 2,600 buses will disappear from the roads in the next year and a half.