Wonder world on wheels?

Pearl Academy student Pallavi Kalra has come up with a design to redo Delhi’s abandoned buses for the homeless

This project is directed towards identifying, recycling and reusing New Delhi’s redundant Blueline buses. Blueline buses, plying in Delhi NCR, which are laid off the roads due to age and metal fatigue, find a new life in their redundancy and acquire a gainful and socially meaningful avatar.  Pallavi Kalra, student of Interior Architecture and Design selected her thesis project ‘Wonder World on Wheels’ after a lot of introspection. During her research, she realised and concluded that to create something truly original, it requires a lot of work, research and out-of-the-box thinking. According to her, the character of Design is thinking completely off the beaten path and creating something which no one has thought about before.

Driving through Delhi NCR she noticed quite a few Blueline buses that had been rendered useless, due to obsolete machinery or metal fatigue. She also observed that often the homeless and destitute rested in the shade of the buses. That’s when she decided that she would combine Design with Recycling to create something functional and named it the Wonder World On Wheels.

DUSIB (Delhi Urban Shelter Improvement Branch) has been constantly trying to rehabilitate the homeless and destitute, as well as construction workers who constantly shift locations. For DUSIB this is a readymade and viable solution. The redundant buses would provide night shelter to the homeless rather than be junked as scrap. This was truly a life changing idea as it would, in small measures, uplift the quality of life and infuse the idea of improved hygiene and access to basic amenities to a large section of society.

Thanks to Pallavi Kalra, the Blueline buses, previously notorious for their high rate of fatal accidents, may soon be seen in a new light as beacons of benevolence. This may end up being a gamechanger if authorities act on this design student’s plan and actually turn it into a useful edifice that can accomodate people who are otherwise at risk on the pavements.

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The New Indian Express
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