3rd straight day of highest spike as L-G approves full seating capacity in buses

New Delhi: Lieutenant Governor Anil Baijal on Friday approved a proposal of the Delhi government allowing cluster and DTC buses in the city to operate at full seating capacity even as Delhi recorded its highest single-day spike of COVID-19 cases for the third day in a row, with the city reporting 5,891 new cases on Friday.

A senior official at the L-G's office confirmed that the proposal had been approved by him, who is also the ex-officio Chairperson of the Delhi Disaster Management Authority (DDMA).

A senior official in the Transport Department of the Delhi Government told Millennium Post that the proposal seeks to allow buses — DTC and Cluster — to run at full seating capacity instead of the current situation, where only 20 passengers are allowed. However, standees will not be allowed, the official added.

Even though COVID-19 cases in the Capital continue to surge, the senior official on account of anonymity said that the Delhi government wants to run buses at full capacity as markets have opened up and residents are facing trouble getting to work with long queues at bus stops, adding that neighbouring states had already started running their transport system at full capacity. Each DTC and cluster bus has around 40-45 seats. SOPs for full seating will be out in a couple of days.

Delhi on Friday added 47 deaths to its toll from the virus, which now stands at 6,470. Moreover, the Delhi government said active cases had increased to 32,363 and the number of patients under home isolation had reached over 19,000 once again.

The highest daily spike came out of the 59,641 tests conducted in the last 24 hours, of which 17,058 were RT-PCR tests and the rest were Rapid Antigen tests.

L-G Baijal has also approved resuming inter-state bus services while the standard operating procedure (SoP) for it will be devised sometime next week, another official from the Transport Department said. The official also added that the proposal for inter-state buses to ply is a separate one and confirmation of its approval has not yet been received by the Department.

In a previous meeting, earlier in the month, the DDMA had discussed the issues related to buses running at full capacity but no conclusion could be reached then.

Meanwhile, leader of the Opposition in Delhi Legislative Assembly Ramvir Singh Bidhuri has thanked the Lieutenant Governor of Delhi, Anil Baijal, for granting permission to travel for up to 40 passengers in DTC buses and said that this will provide relief to the bus passengers of Delhi.

(With inputs from

Roushan Ali)