Ahmedabad:The ride in public transport buses in Ahmedabad will now be smoother and eco-friendly as Union Home Minister Amit Shah in the afternoon today flagged off the first fleet of eco-friendly electric buses in the city. These electric buses will be operated on major junctions on regular intervals from today onwards. The Home Minister also inaugurated the country’s first automated battery charging and swapping station for e-buses here.
The Home Minister also attended an event organised by the Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation at the Science City to mark the culmination of the civic body’s tree plantation drive. As many as 10 lakh trees were planted across Ahmedabad today.Under the Faster Adaption and Manufacture of (Hybrid) and Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme, Gujarat will get 550 electric buses with Ahmedabad alone getting 300 buses. It should be noted that each bus can carry up to 50 passengers and are silent and will not emit smoke. The buses also have automatic door sensors and won’t start if the doors are open.
The ride in city transport buses will be silent, smoother and environment-friendly from Thursday onwards as Ahmedabad Municipal Corporation (AMC) is going to start operating electric buses on certain routes on a regular basis. Union home minister.
Mayor Bijal Patel said that this will be beginning of a journey for making the city cleaner and greener. A total of 50 buses will be rolled out, of which 32 will be regular electric buses, while the rest 18 will be swap technology, in which batteries will be swapped instead of regular charging.Municipal Commissioner Vijay Nehra said that this will reduce the weight of the buses and thereby enable it to carry more passengers.”Each battery is about 600 kg. If more such batteries are required, the additional weight will reduce the number of passengers. There is a dedicated facility of fast charging and swap station at Ranip, where these batteries will be swapped. It takes about four minutes to replace the battery. The entire process is robotic and automated,” said Nehra.
The facility can charge 12 batteries simultaneously. While normal electric buses can run up to 200 km per charge, buses with swap facility can run only up to 40 km. Regular buses will undergo overnight charging.
The buses are procured from Ashok Leyland under gross cost model, wherein Ashok Leyland will own, operate and maintain the buses, while AMC will pay the company at per kilometer rate. So, it is only operational expenses that AMC will have to bear, rather than capital and maintenance expenditure in a conventional model.Nehra informed that trial runs have been conducted for about six months now and the services are being rolled out on a regular basis. Moreover, this is only the first batch of buses that AMC has received from the central government, and the second batch is expected to arrive in about two months.
Under the Faster Adaption and Manufacture of (Hybrid) and Electric Vehicles (FAME) scheme, Ahmedabad will get 300 electric buses, only to be rivaled by cities like Mumbai, Delhi, Bengaluru, and Hyderabad. Gujarat is getting 550 electric buses under the scheme, which aims to give 5,595 electric buses to 64 cities across the country.Nehra informed that city will get another 32 electric buses in the second phase in about two months from now.