NEW DELHI: After Transport Minister Kailash Gahlot’s visit to a Tata Motors plant in Lucknow and an Ashok Leyland manufacturing unit in Alwar to take stock of buses to be procured for the national capital, more have started arriving into the city.
While a fresh batch of buses, which arrived in two phases of 10 and 15, have docked at Rani Khera depot, 30 more are expected to roll into the Dwarka depot over the next few days.
“While 10 semi-low floor buses arrived at the Rani Khera depot in the first phase, 15 more were added to the fleet later. These buses have similar features as the 25, which were inaugurated by Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal at the Dwarka depot,” an official at the depot told this newspaper.
The only difference between the fresh lot of buses and the ones received from the Alwar unit earlier is that the new ones have three doors.
“The door at the centre is enabled with a hydraulic lift to help differently-abled and wheelchair-bound passengers board and alight the bus. The remaining features, including panic buttons and CCTV cameras, are similar to the buses received earlier,” the official said.
However, the new arrivals — 25 at Rani Khera and another 30 likely at the Dwarka depot in the next few days — still falls short of the 125 buses that were scheduled to arrive in September.
The buses expected at the Dwarka depot would arrive from the Ashok Leyland plant in Rajasthan’s Alwar. The first lot of buses, too, arrived from Alwar.