Ranchi Municipal Corporation (RMC) is planning to purchase new city buses to supplement the public transport system of the State capital. The urban local body will procure several city buses and low floor buses within the next two to three months.
State Urban Development Department has given its consent to RMC for utilising its surplus funds amounting to Rs3.5 crores for making additions to its present fleet of city buses. The civic guardians are presently mulling over the finer details of the project.
“We have been asked to use the corpus of funds with us in the form of balance amount for acquiring new buses. The available amount is enough to buy around 20 new buses,” stated Ramendra Prasad of Jawaharlal Nehru National Urban Renewal Mission Cell under RMC.
Presently, the city bus service of Ranchi consists of 49 buses out of 51 buses which were given to Kishor Mantri Travels.
“As of now, the aspect of ownership of the new buses is under consideration. Although tenders might be floated to decide the agency that will be given the responsibility of running these buses, we are proposing in the Detailed Project Report to form a Special Purpose Vehicle (SPV) for the job,” Prasad further stated.
RMC is also taking notice of its project to operate low floor buses in the city, proposed three years ago but still awaiting completion. Interested bidders will be invited soon for procuring the vehicles, stated Additional Municipal Commissioner Bidya Nand Sharma Pankaj.
“We are going to float tenders shortly for purchasing 26 low floor buses which will run within Ranchi. The entire process will take up two to three months,” he said.
Funds to the tune of Rs10 crores have been set aside for purchasing 30 low floor buses when the fleet was conceptualises back in mid-2013, but were left untouched for the past three years. The buses were proposed to be with and without air conditioning facilities and were meant to better the public transport scenario of Ranchi.
Amidst these new plans, old ideas of bringing in unused city buses from other districts to Ranchi seem to be history. Several vehicles lying unused in other major cities of Jharkhand were to be added to the State capital’s city bus fleet.
“This seems to have lost steam. More than 100 city buses were supposed to be brought in from Dhanbad and Jamshedpur and the involved process had been initiated, but that’s all,” Prasad said.