The bids for the PM e-Bus sewa scheme are expected to come by the end of January 2024, announced Minister for Housing and Urban Development, Hardeep Singh Puri. He described the scheme as different from the FAME scheme, which covers nine large cities. He stated that the e-bus scheme involves operations and its amount is to be provisioned by the central and state governments for the operator.
It was launched on August 16, 2023, with the aim of augmenting bus operations through the deployment of 10,000 electric buses on a public-private partnership (PPP) model. The PM e-Bus sewa scheme covers cities with a population of 3 lakh and above, except the ones covered under the FAME scheme.
He assured that the December 2025 cutoff is designed in a way to ensure schemes in the pipeline achieve completion, terming the Pradhan Mantri Aawas Yojana (PMAY) scheme as based on the ability to put a bouquet of opportunities before states under the spirit of cooperative federalism.
Pointing out that only 8 lakh houses were made out of the 13 lakh houses sanctioned between 2004 and 2014, he said that the current government has walked its talk by providing houses to 80 lakh beneficiaries out of the 1.19 crore houses sanctioned between 2014 and 2023.
Rubbishing reports that claimed little or no use of built-up infrastructure, he explained that all capex needs to be processed with maturity as many metro systems across cities are breaking even and many others are on the verge of breaking even. As a case in point, he gave the example of the Smart Cities Mission project, where no country had experience working with densely populated cities.
He explained that the BJP's manifesto in the 2014 polls promising 100 new smart cities had overlooked a basic fact about upgrading the existing ones. He said that the experience in smart cities has been documented with instances of improvement in traffic management and women's safety.
While he dismissed the Kerala government's allegations of discrimination in central schemes, he highlighted that problems do arise when central projects are implemented in states where the state wants to showcase them as their own, as schemes provisioned for by the centre need to carry the scheme logo.
