Uttarakhand Govt. plans to buy 500 electic buses in next three years. 51 of these will be bought now by the Govt.. The remaining 400+ electric buses will be bought through PPP route.

In its attempt to fight pollution in the Uttarakhand hills, the Uttarakhand Transport Corporation (UTC), is planning to add 500 more electric buses to its fleet in the next three years.

Notably, the UTC started conducting the first trial run of such buses on Dehradun-Mussourie route, on October 9 this year. It was flagged off by the Uttarakhand CM Trivendra Singh Rawat. The UTC found the results of the trial run promising. The next trial run of the electric buses will take place on the Nainital-Haldwani route next month.

That said, since the big share of the traffic on these and other longer routes consists of private buses, trucks and private vehicles, hence the Government must pay attention to that aspect as well. It must also ensure that it doesn't adversely affect the livelihoods of the locals using vehicles run on conventional fuels.

To conclude, the cost-return study of such electric vehicles is still not fully understood. In addition, they are known to solve connectivity issues on small routes only (30-50 Kms). The Govt. must also pay attention to the fact that many of these initiatives die out early, and account for serious wastage of people's money.

But still, if other aspects such as cost and maintenance issues are not taken into consideration then the initiative is good.

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