Tender floated for 1.5K electric buses, 1st batch to start arriving from March
New Delhi: The tender for 1,500 electric buses for the Delhi Transport Corporation's (DTC) fleet has now been floated and the pre-bid is expected to be submitted on or by January 30, a senior official from the Delhi government said on Thursday.
The government will be receiving 1,500 DTC buses starting from March 2023 in batches till 2025, according to the senior official in the Transport Department, who added that the final submission of bids will likely be concluded by the end of next month.
"The buses will arrive in batches and we have worked it out in such a way that the old CNG buses will be moved out as they reach their maximum life so that at any given time there is adequate supply of buses on the road and gradually only EV buses will start to ply on the city's roads," another junior official told Millennium Post.
The department is also concerned about the space constraint of parking the buses and the requisite charging infrastructure, which will take time to be set up. "If too many buses are there in one go — the old CNG and the new Electric buses — then where will we park all of them. The depots do not have that much space," the senior official explained.
The Transport department is currently working on expanding the electric charging stations so they can meet the demand once the buses start to arrive.
"We have been given a deadline of the end of this year to set up an adequate number of charging stations across the city. Once the E buses start to arrive, there should be enough charging stations ready to be used," the junior official added.
The Delhi government's push for the 1,500 new buses came as a pitch for the Union government's "Grand Challenge" scheme, under which around 3,500 buses will be procured by the Government of India for allotment to State transport undertakings of nine mega-cities. Four of these cities have opted out of the challenge and the Capital is among the five that have pitched for it.
The state government began the year with the induction of the first few buses to be added to the fleet since 2011, followed by the induction of the DTC's first electric bus.
By the end of October this year, the transport department hopes to replace 450 buses retiring from the DTC fleet with cluster buses. A tender for this is in the final stages of preparation and will be floated soon. As many as 330 electric buses, also under the cluster scheme, are expected to be inducted by the end of the year.
