Currently, out of nearly 3,800 buses run by DTC, more than 3,000 are in service between 10-12 years, roughly 700 buses since more than 12 years and the 40-50 buses are aged between 8-10 years, effectively meaning that over 99% vehicles are overage.
New Delhi: The Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) is facing a major issue as most of the buses operated by it are declared overage and had forced the government to ask for repeated extension of maintenance contracts. It had also resulted in almost 100% increase in the operational and maintenance cost of the entire fleet of buses in the last few years. Multiple sources have confirmed to The Sunday Guardian that the DTC had indicated to the Delhi government to speed up the process of procurement of new buses to avert the crisis.
Currently, out of nearly 3,800 buses run under the DTC, more than 3,000 are in service between 10-12 years, roughly 700 buses are in service since more than 12 years and the 40-50 buses are aged between 8-10 years, effectively meaning that over 99% vehicles are overaged. A vehicle which is in the service for more than eight years is considered overaged in technical terms. When The Sunday Guardian talked with the DTC bus drivers and other staff, they also said that they regularly face breakdown of buses midway in the journey and other problems during operating them. Shivnath, a DTC staff at the Rohini bus depot, said, “On many occasions, we face the issue of breakdown as the buses we use are very old and had covered distance of more than 10 lakh kilometers; despite all the attempts to keep the fleet of buses in good working condition, it is not practically feasible to keep them very active, DTC needs new buses at the earliest.”
As per various estimates, when these buses were new around the 2008-09 period, the maintenance cost which also included material and spare part costs, was around Rs 380-400 crore; now in the last three years, it had increased to more than Rs 800 crore, which is approximately 100% more. The operational costs of the DTC buses have also increased three times in the last 10 years.
A senior Delhi Transport Corporation official said, “I agree there has been a problem since the last few years as most of the buses are over aged in service. But we are addressing the issue; roughly 3,000 new buses will join the fleet of DTC in the next one-and-a-half years. Out of the new buses, almost 70% will be electric buses as other capitals have also gone electric. The new buses have started arriving, you must have seen that in January this year the first electric bus for the DTC was procured by the Delhi government after almost ten years. In the coming two months more than 200 electric buses will arrive and in the next 15 months similar fleets of buses will join the DTC. It will somehow solve our problem and we will be able to meet the increasing demands of the city.”
The Opposition parties have questioned the Delhi government on the issue and argued that the government is playing with the lives of the common people. Their argument is when private vehicles which were in service for a long time are removed from the roads in view of the National Green Tribunal (NGT) guidelines then why the government of Delhi is exempting its own vehicles. Talking to The Sunday Guardian, Ram Sharan Choudhary, a BJP-leader based in East Delhi, said, “The government is not only causing harm to the commuters and staff of the DTC but also to the state treasure as the maintenance and operational cost of these vehicles are quite high, we also see that due to overage these vehicles get non-functional at times during the journey, the government must bring new DTC buses at the earliest.”