What’s choking Delhi then? The answer possibly lies in governance deficit. The biggest contributor, we now know, is automobile pollution, which has steadily increased, thanks to the shrinking public transport network. The Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal believes public transport would improve by giving free rides to women on the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC)- run buses. Give them a free ride by all means but first get the buses to ply on the roads.In the past seven years, the average kilometres covered daily by the DTC fleet has come down from 9.68 lakh to 6.32 lakh or less. This has brought down the number of passengers carried per day from 46.77 lakh to 31.01 lakh. This has all happened because the number of buses in the DTC fleet has come down from 6,204 in March 2013 to less than 3,500 in the present. In the past seven years the number of operational DTC depots has come down from 46 to 39.The bigger scandal is that 99.15 percent buses are over-aged and not fuel-efficient, thus adding their bit to the pollution. In March 2015 when Arvind Kejriwal was re-elected as chief minister for a full-term, the number of overaged buses in the DTC fleet was as low as 19.74 percent while the current figure is 99.15 percent.The tussle between the city and the central government has delayed the expansion of the metro network. Another initiative of the previous governments at the Centre and in Delhi — Regional Rapid Transit System (RRTS) for mobility and connectivity in the National Capital Region (NCR) has been deferred due to this turf war.
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