Impressed by the success of the mini passenger green vehicle named, ‘Alwar Vahini’ in encouraging people to shift from private vehicles to the public facility in Rajasthan’s Alwar, the Centre wants all the States to introduce similar passenger-friendly service to decongest the streets.
A joint effort of cooperative society and the Alwar district administration, Euro IV compliant eight-seater vehicles were launched as ‘Alwar Vahini’ in December 2011 with an aim to replace highly-pollutant and unorganised transport system comprised of shared auto-rickshaws, tempos, vikrams in the district.
The vehicle is rapidly becoming popular in the city. Its strength has already reached to over 1,300 from 58 when it was launched almost an year ago as a joint efforts of various organisations like the RTO, lead banks, UIT Alwar and Bhiwadi with the district administration playing the coordinating role.
Describing it as a ‘modern, comfortable, safe, organised and self-sustainable’ public transport system that has been implemented without any financial outgo from the Government, Union UD Secretary Sudhir Krishna in a recent letter to all the States said that “it (Alwar Vahini) has not only improved their public transport service, but has generated 3,000-plus jobs also in the city.
“The mobility of people has increased and there is a tremendous shift from private vehicles to Alwar Vahini public transport.”
Krishna’s letter follows concern that most of the cities especially small and medium size cities have informal public transport such as auto-rickshaws, tempos, vikrams etc which not only create chaos on the streets but also are a major source of pollution.
Lauding the city administration efforts to make the ‘Alwar Vahini’ more attractive and acceptable to public, Krishna said that “Alwar Vahini is a model worth emulating in all cities and specially small and medium size cities to act either as the public transport system or act as the feeder system for other high capacity systems like city buses, BRTS, metro etc to make the system more safer and passenger as well as operator friendly.”
The UD Secretary has also suggested installation of the intelligence traffic system such as global positioning system on these vehicles so that they can be monitored, controlled and coordinated from a central control centre.
The control centre can be set up on PPP basis and the individual small public transport vehicle owners/operators pay a small monthly fee to the PPP control centre operator, he said.
src: Daily Pioneer