CHENNAI: The first bench of Madras High Court, consisting of Acting Chief Justice T Raja and Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy, on Tuesday reserved the orders on a batch of petitions challenging the Tamil Nadu government’s tenders to purchase buses and seeking orders to make all the future procurements fully low-floor buses.
After lengthy arguments on part of the counsel for the petitioners, which included the disabled rights activist Vaishnavi Jayakumar, and senior Counsel PS Raman, representing the Transport department and Additional Advocate General J Ravindran, representing the state government, the judges reserved the orders.
While the petitioners sought that all the proposed procurement of buses for the State-run transport corporations should be made low-floored in order to provide better transportation to the disabled persons, the government side promised to make progress in a gradual manner. During the course of the arguments, the bench indicated striking a middle path of making 15% of the proposed purchase of fleet low-floor.
Raman and Ravindran told the court the government has proposed to purchase 1,107 buses, of which, 402 are low-floor buses. Apart from this, another fleet 442 buses, all low-floor, will be purchased resulting in increase of the share of low-floor buses in the overall fleet. Moreover, 100 electric buses, which are also low-floor, will be purchased.