KARACHI: An international consortium has offered to make Karachi the leader in green public transport solutions by investing in modern high tech electric fleet of buses to service public transport.
The Energy Global Venture (EGV) on Saturday met with Sindh Chief Minister Murad Ali Shah to find solutions to the transport problems in the city.
The company offered to provide 24-hour public transport solutions to transform city transport. They said that they would start operation by investing in 1000 electric buses which would run on the main roads and on different routes of BRT.
The EGV assured that they would adopt more routes of BRT lines as per development plan that needs to be agreed between the Sindh government and the company.
To a query of the chief minister, the EGV company said that 1000 buses would be started within 12 months when an agreement was signed and another 10,000 more electric buses would be added in the fleet within the next five years.
The target is to provide transport for up to 400,000 passengers per day after first year and over two million people per day which would be achieved in five years, they said.
The chief minister said that the construction of Abdul Sattar Edhi Line project was almost finished and is in final stages. He asked them to visit the corridor and inspect its infrastructure. He said the company will be invited if the infrastructure is good enough to ply electric buses.
CM Sindh said that the company would be allocated separate land for installation of 100MW solar power plant for charging electric buses. He asked EGV to hold separate meetings with the World Bank and Asian Bank, who are project partners so that ongoing infrastructure development of the BRT is made accordingly.
The chief minister directed transport department, Sindh Investment Department and Planning & Development chairperson firm up EGV’s recommendations and submit a report within the next 15 days.
