The Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) officials on Sunday said that the public transport operator would likely add 100 more electric buses to its fleet by the end of March or the first week of April. The latest procurement will bring the fleet of electric buses operated by the DTC to 400.
Recent bus inspections of the fleet were conducted by Delhi Transport Commissioner Ashish Kundra at the Tata Motors plant in Lucknow. Shilpa Shinde, the DTC MD, visited Karnataka last month to supervise the prototype models, news agency PTI reported.
Following the setup and registration process, these buses will begin operating on the roads of the national capital in the subsequent three to four weeks, the report quoted an official as saying. These buses are outfitted with security elements like CCTV cameras and panic buttons.
First of many
According to the PTI report, the 100 new electric buses will be the first of 1,500 that will be inducted into the Transport department’s fleet by the end of 2023, taking their total number to 1,800.
Earlier, on the occasion of flagging off the electric buses in January, Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal
Sharing a roadmap for the 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 procured. There are nearly 7,200 buses plying on the city roads — the DTC runs 3,900 buses and the cluster runs 3,300. At the same time, 2,600 buses will go off the roads in the next one-and-a-half years, the report further stated.