DTC can’t do without space near Yamuna

Tuesday, Nov 23, 2010




Delhi government's limpet-like affinity for the Millennium Bus Depot is hardly surprising given the fact that even with the 1,000 buses capacity depot, the transport department is short of parking space for 3,000 buses if it is to implement the SC-directives to follow the RITES report on sustainable public transport.

According to the report, Delhi needs 10,000 buses for a viable public transport system and the parking space available in the city at present, including the Millennium Depot, can cater to just about 5,000 buses. Bluelines have no designated parking and are parked on the roads at night, a fate that DTC may not be very far from should it lose the Millennium Depot either to activism or to a court order. Minus Millennium, DTC has parking space for just about 4,000 vehicles whereas its own fleet strength now stands at more than 5,000. Of this parking space for 4,000 vehicles, space for 1,000 parking at Barapullah and at Dayal Singh College has been added only very recently.

The urgency about parking space is even more because the first bus cluster is due very soon and the transport department has already got sanctions for four more with 700-odd buses. This means that in the next year or so, 900 more buses are already expected to come into the city with no provision of parking.

Chief secretary Rakesh Mehta on Monday admitted that there was indeed a problem of parking when he said that without the depot "we will park our buses along the Ring Road from Ashram,'' going on to add that far from vacating that spot, the government's priority now was to bolster parking capacity if it was to heed the SC directive.

"It is almost a dilemma. There is Yamuna Jiye Abhiyan kicking up a storm about the depot coming up on the river bed. But how can that be, when it has been a fly ash dumping ground for the past 45 years? The area our depot covers has 25-30m of fly ash. We also have to implement the SC directive about cleaning the city's air. We not just risk SC's ire but more importantly it is almost a trade off between a clean river and clean air. As it is we are spending Rs 3,000 crore on cleaning up the river,'' Mehta said. He, however, conceded that the government had indeed said the depot was to be a temporary affair but said "by that we had essentially meant that we would not be constructing office buildings or other such things there.''

In its quest for more parking space for buses, Delhi government is at present looking at a 200-bus parking at Rajghat and another one with a capacity of about 500 to 600, when the Rajghat power plant closes down. Beyond that, however, there are no concrete plans though the transport department is said to be looking at options like the Burari drain.

Original news source http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/city/delhi/DTC-cant-do-without-space-near-Yamuna/articleshow/6972453.cms#ixzz1655hd6ye