NEW DELHI, August 3, 2022—Delhi Pradesh Congress Committee president Ch. Anil Kumar said that eight years after coming to power, and the Delhi Transport Corporation running its operations with a skeletal  fleet due to severe shortage of buses, Delhi Chief Minister Arvind Kejriwal has realized the need for “route rationalization” after seeking public “feedback on the same”, though commuters are the most harassed lot.

Ch. Anil Kumar said that the purpose behind Kejriwal’s “route rationalization” plan was a ploy to hand over profitable routes to private operators, and eventually hand over the public transport operations to private hands. He said that no bus has been added to the DTC fleet in the past 8 years, and it requires heavy financial infusion to revive DTC from its neck-deep debt trap, but instead Kejriwal wants to give the bus operations to private cartels.

Ch. Anil Kumar said that when Congress was in power, DTC was in a robust health with sufficient buses in its fleet, and commuters heavily depended on DTC buses for their daily travel, but now catching a DTC bus on time has become a difficult task, as the DTC fleet has withered like a skeleton. He said that strengthening public transport was one of the 10-point guarantee Kejriwal had promised to Delhiites, about which even the Supreme Court had given direction as the  situation has now become so critical that the DTC needs a minimum of 11,000  more buses on the roads to cater to the heavy rush every day. He said that  Kejriwal does not have any idea about  how many buses DTC need to run an effective public transport system, as he seems to have ‘lost’ his memory like his Minister Satyender Jain, presently in jail for a money-laundering case.

Ch. Anil Kumar said that in the past eight years, Chief Minister Kejrwial and his Ministers only made commissions from every deal, and the most glaring examples were the sell out of the liquor trade to the liquor mafia, and the Rs 4288 crore DTC bus purchase and maintenance contracts scam, about which Delhi Congress had filed a complaint to the CBI, which has been taken cognizance by the probe agency. He said that like Excise Minister Manish Sisodia, Transport Minister Kailash Ghelot too will be in troubled waters, sooner than later, and they will take Kejriwal along.