Andhra Pradesh Drops Move to Introduce 350 Electric Buses

Andhra Pradesh has dropped the move to introduce 350 electric buses in the state, on the directions of the state Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy

The Andhra Pradesh State Road Transport Corporation (APSRTC) has dropped the move to introduce 350 electric buses in the state. On the directions of the state Chief Minister YS Jagan Mohan Reddy, the APSRTC cancelled its tender floated in September seeking to deploy the electric buses.

Initially, he wanted to introduce 1,000 such buses at one-go but later reduced the number to 350 because of ‘logistic reasons’.

Just days before the tender was supposed to be opened, the Chief Minister wanted it to be referred to the Judicial Preview Commission for scrutiny as per the Andhra Pradesh Infrastructure (Transparency through Judicial Preview) Act, 2019, following allegations that the government was seeking to favour a particular company in awarding the contract.

Even as officials were getting ready to comply with the Chief Ministers directive, he issued a fresh order that the move is dropped entirely.

Reddy has now asked us to drop the proposal fully because the costs are working out to be high. Instead, he asked us to buy 1,000 new buses to replace the aged fleet, Transport Minister Perni Venkataramaiah (Nani) told.

The state RTC wanted to hire 350 electric buses for a period of 12 years duly availing the demand incentive from the Union Heavy Industry department. The RTC had planned to deploy 50 buses on the Tirupati-Tirumala ghat route, 100 each in Vijayawada and Visakhapatnam and 50 each in Kakinada and Amaravati, to be run on various routes in the respective regions.

The financial bids were supposed to be opened on November 4, 2019, and reverse tendering to be conducted on November 6, 2019, as per the original schedule.

Moreover, the cost of each bus was over Rs 2 crore while the charging infrastructure was non-existent, he said. We need to spend at least Rs 200 crore to create a charging infrastructure for the buses. Thats quite a burden given the precarious financial position of the corporation, the official added. Seeing reason, the Chief Minister finally decided to give up the idea of introducing the electric buses.

Recently, Energy Efficiency Services Limited (EESL) had scaled down its electric vehicle (EV) order by 70 percent to 3,000 units and blamed its largest customer Andhra Pradesh for the crisis as the present Jaganmohan Reddy government has canceled the orders placed by the previous Chandrababu Naidu administration.