Archives

NEW DELHI, April 7 (AFP) - The city administration of India's national capital of 14 million people Sunday ordered local schools to close from Monday amid fears of transport chaos after diesel-run buses were banned.

State-run and privately-owned schools, numbering around 2,500, will remain closed for two days to ease the burden on the city's depleted fleet of buses which operate on environment-friendly Compressed Natural Gas (CNG).

"The (city) government ordered the closure of the schools so that about 1,000 CNG buses could be made available to meet the transport needs of office-goers," New Delhi Transport Minister Ajay Maken said.

"The government has also chalked out a contingency plan to meet the situation and ensure minimum inconvenience to commuters," he added.

The steps were part of emergency measures taken by the city government to avert a breakdown of public transporation following last week's ban by India's Supreme Court on New Delhi's fleet of 8,000 diesel-run buses.

The ban implemented the next day choked the capital's fleet of 6,700 CNG buses on the weekend and the city government said the chaos could become unmanageable when businesses, offices and schools reopen on Monday.

The supreme court Friday rejected appeals seeking extra time for New Delhi's public bus owners to phase out their diesel-run vehicles in favour of those that run on CNG.

It said all diesel buses would have to pay a 500-rupee (10-dollar) fine a day unless they converted to CNG and warned the daily penalty would be jacked up to 1,000 rupees after 30 days.

Some 4.5 million people in New Delhi use buses every day and a majority of the city schools hire the vehicles to ferry tens of thousands of children to and from their homes.

Transport Minister Maken said his government would appeal to the supreme court Monday against the ban and give an assurance that more CNG buses would be brought on to Delhi streets.

"We will move the supreme court requesting it to permit plying of the diesel buses without fines as there is no adequate supply of CNG," he said.

"We will be also giving a commitment to the court that 800 diesel buses as ordered by it would be phased out every month."

The transport minister argued the judicial body itself had conceded that CNG was not available in adequate quantities in this city of 2.5 million vehicles.

New Delhi's current monthly supply of CNG was 400,000 kilograms while the supreme court had earlier suggested that it must be increased to 1.6 million kilograms by the end of June to meet the demand.

An ongoing project to install a tube railway in the capital is likely to end in 2021.

Transporters, meanwhile, reiterated Sunday that they would not put their diesel buses back on the roads because the fines would corrode their already shrinking profits. They said New Delhi's CNG filling stations were incapable of handling the existing demand.

In April and in August last year, city bus, taxi and auto drivers went on strike in protest against the poor availability of CNG in New Delhi.

Members of New Delhi's bus owners' associations also accuse politicians of lining their pockets with largesse allegedly gifted to them by CNG suppliers in return for promoting the crackdown on Delhi's diesel buses.

News | Business | Features | Editorial | Security
Politics | World | Letters | Sports | Obituaries |

Produced by Lake House
Copyright 2001 The Associated Newspapers of Ceylon Ltd.
Comments and suggestions to :Web Manager