Larger Cities Set To Get 150 E-Buses Under PM eBus Sewa 

The Ministry of Housing and Urban Affairs (MoHUA) has now released its Prime Minister eBus Sewa guidelines. Earlier on August 16 this year, the Union Cabinet had approved the scheme for augmenting electric mobility in Indian cities. The scheme aims to deploy 10,000 e-buses under PPP mode in 169 Indian cities.

The scheme aims to upgrade the infrastructure in 181 cities under the Green Urban Mobility initiative. It has earmarked a total of Rs 57,613 crore under the scheme. The norms said that the government would select the cities under the scheme through a ‘Challenge Method’. The norms also specify the maximum number of e-buses allocated to different cities and the central assistance (CA) per kilometer based on the population. 

The guidelines said that from a city with a population between 20-40 lakhs a total of 150 electric buses could be allocated. For this category, the government has allocated CA support/km at Rs 24/km for standard EVs, Rs 22/km for midi and Rs 20/kms for mini electric buses. The CA assistance for all cities has been maintained at these rates. The MoHUA norms said that cities with 5-20 lakh populations will be given 100 e-buses, whereas cities below 5 lakh can avail of 50 electric buses under the scheme. 

The ministry guidelines also said that the government will disburse central assistance for developing and upgradation of bus depots for selected cities for the sanctioned number of buses up to March 2027. The document said that those cities with populations between 3 lakh to 40 lakh and other state capitals with less than 3 lakh population would get upto 60 percent of central assistance. 

The ministry norms said that through the challenge method, all proposals from the states would be collected at the central level. “All proposals submitted by the States and approved by MoHUA will constitute the aggregated demand for all-India tendering by CESL. CESL will divide this aggregated demand into different lots. The lots may be based on bus type and regions/States. CESL will float a unified tender for price discovery of different lot. The contract duration would be for 12 years,” the norms said. 

The scoring of states for the challenge would be based on scoring. The scoring will consider issues like the deficit of buses in states, availability of bus depots, availability of power supply, earnings per km and scrapping of ICE buses.