KSRTC floats tenders to lease 1,500 electric buses for 10 years

Thiruvananthapuram (Urban Transport News): To avail Rs.4,500 crores subsidy under Centre's FAME-II ( Faster Adoption & Manufacturing of Electric Vehicles) scheme, the state’s public transport entity Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) has floated tenders to lease 1,500 electric buses for 10 years. However, Kerala which had earlier started e-bus service but failed to sustain the lease rate of Rs 43.20 per km. “Once the central subsidy is in place, this rent rate can be tight belted to a rate below Rs 30 per km, making the e-bus commercially viable,” MP Dinesh, Managing Director of KSRTC said to FE. R Sasidharan, secretary of transport union said that the Kerala State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) had not gone for the subsidy from the Central Government during its first tryst with electric bus. He said that FAME-1 was wound up by the time KSRTC got around applying for it. Ten electric buses, leased from Mahavoyage, are currently idling in KSRTC stables, after they bled the ailing corporation by incurring the loss of Rs 1 lakh per day. With battery running out often, the e-bus experiment was hardly successful. To avail subsidy under FAME-II scheme, which was announced in March this year by the Centre, KSRTC has submitted a fresh proposal. According to the proposal, leasing an electric bus would cost Rs 2 crore, but the corporation will get a subsidy of Rs 60 lakh per bus under the FAME-II scheme. The state government is committed to roll out one million electric vehicles on the road by 2022. The tenders are floated with tightened tender norms with a new condition that the bidder should guarantee that the battery-powered e-bus will run for 250 km in a single charge and the mileage should be a minimum of 1.5 kWh/km. According to the notification issued by the KSRTC, tenders has been floated for hiring of single axle 12 metre non-AC battery powered Electric Buses on Wet Lease and Dry Lease basis for KKD, EKM and TVM zones.