Delhi govt gets more land for bus terminal.

The Delhi government received a little over 12 acres of land in Rohini from the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) on Monday for setting up a bus terminal after repeatedly claiming that lack of land for depots was one reason it had not been able to buy more buses.

Announcing that the DDA was handing over the parcel of land, Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot said he hoped the authority would give more such plots to the government so it could “get more buses and augment public transport”.

While the Delhi government has been unable to buy new buses since 2010 because of a variety of reasons, including the maintenance clause in the contract that made the project too expensive, the AAP dispensation has said the delay in transfer of land for depots has also affected the plan. On November 13, Mr. Gahlot had written to L-G Anil Baijal, who is the chairperson of DDA, asking for allotment of 135 acres needed to accommodate 11,000 buses.

In his letter, Mr. Gahlot said that Delhi currently had 5,594 buses, operated by the Delhi Transport Corporation and the cluster bus service, and was working towards increasing the number to 11,000. Citing a report by the Environment Pollution (Prevention and Control) Authority to the Supreme Court in May 2016, Mr. Gahlot said the Capital needed 460 acres to park 11,000 buses. He said the government had 257 acres already and construction of depots on another 68 acres was going on. He asked the L-G to direct the DDA to allot the remaining 135 acres.

Currently, the government is in the process of procuring 2,000 more buses — 1,000 low-floor and standard-floor each - for which land is already available.

In 2016, the Transport Department had submitted to the National Green Tribunal that it needed 500 acres of land to accommodate 10,000 additional buses. The department sought directions to the DDA to identify “unencroached/ undisputed” parcels of land. This was after the DDA handed over four parcels of land between 2011 and 2015 that either had encroachments, or were disputed, as per the government.

THE HINDU