Indian Government Sanctions 5,595 Electric Buses Under Fame-II

In order to abide by the purpose of the second phase of the FAME scheme, the government of India has sanctioned a total of 5,595 electric buses that will be running in the 64 cities of the country as public vehicles for carrying out intercity and intracity operations.

For boosting clean mobility the Ministry of Heavy Industry (MoHI) and the Public Enterprise had invited an Expression of Interest (EoI) for the submission of the proposal for distributing electric buses at an operational cost basis. As per EoI, buses which satisfy required localization level and technical eligibility notified under FAME India scheme phase II will be eligible for funding under FAME India scheme phase II.

In this process, the Department of Heavy Industry received around 86 proposals from all the states and UTs of the country for the deployment of 14,988 electric buses. After analysing these proposals and on the advice of Project Implementation and Sanctioning Committee (PISC) the government has assigned about 5,095 electric buses for intracity purpose, 400 buses for intercity operation and also 100 buses for last-mile connectivity to the DMRC (Delhi Metro Rail Corporation). The above details were officially released by the Ministry.

The buses will be manufactured under the joint venture of the Indian automaker JBM and the Polish brand, Solaris Bus and Coach. The companies will be investing a total of INR 300 crore in the coming 2 to 3 years. In the further process, all the selected cities or STUs (State Transport Undertaking) require to participate in the initiation of the procurement process in a time-bound manner for the purpose of the deployment of the electric buses that will be then availed at an operational cost basis.

The buses are expected to run 4 billion kilometres during contracts which will further save 1.2 billion litres of fuel cutting down around 2.6 million tonnes of CO2 emissions.

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