CHENNAI: With the Madras High Court passing its order on the procurement of the low-floor buses, the transport department is all set to speed up the process of the procurement of 1,771 diesel buses including 157 low-floor buses for the benefit of persons with disabilities (PwD).
The court also made it clear that the permission to purchase the high-floor buses is granted as an exception and in future, only low-floor buses should be procured.
In the order dated April 18, Acting Chief Justice T Raja and Justice D Bharatha Chakravarthy directed the Institute Road Transport (IRT) to float a fresh tender to procure 157 low-floor buses within 2 weeks from the date of receipt of the order copy.
It has limited the procurement of buses of floor height 900 mm to 950 mm, as against the planned 1,107 buses.
Sources in the corporation said that the tender would be floated soon for amending the existing bid and procurement of buses as per the court order.
The IRT floated a tender on October 10 last year to procure 1,771 buses including 1,107 buses that would be 11 metres long with a floor height of 900 mm, 484 buses 11 metres long with 1,150 mm floor height and 180 buses of 1,150 mm floor height.
The court also directed the procurement of the 342 low-floor buses – both electric and diesel – to be processed and expedited so that the fleet is in place simultaneously with these high-floor buses.
A committee should be formed in the cities including Chennai comprising of officials each from the transport department, IRT, MTC and one representative from the differently-abled organisation to deliberate and decide when (timings) and where (routes) these buses would ply, taking into account that it must be benefit to PwDs the most.
Orders were passed on a batch of petitions filed by PwDs, including activist Vaishnavi Jayakumar, who sought the court to issue directions to the transport corporations to procure only low-floor buses.
They also challenged a tender floated by the department for purchasing new buses, saying the low-floor buses were less in number in the proposed purchase.
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