No more chassis, Punjab Govt eyes roadways bus purchase directly from makers

The wait for the purchase of 650 buses for the state’s transport fleet will end soon.

To bring transparency in the purchase of the buses, the state government has decided to purchase fully built buses directly from vehicle manufacturers instead of buying bus chassis and then get custom-built bus body fabricated.

Specifications regarding the purchase of the buses are being tweaked. The Transport Department requires 400 buses for the Punjab Roadways Transport Corporation (PRTC) and 250 for Punbus.

Punjab Transport Minister Laljit Singh Bhullar has directed the department to procure the new buses at the earliest.

The PRTC is already in the process of finalising the specifications for the purchase of the fully-built midi buses (midi-bus is a type of bus that falls between a minibus and a full-sized bus).

JS Grewal, president of the Punjab’s Small Scale Bus Operators Association, said the policy of midi buses had been withdrawn in 2015. “Instead the government should buy full-sized buses”, he added.

The purchase of the buses had been delayed due to an ongoing Punjab vigilance probe into the alleged wrong-doing in the fabrication of bus bodies during the previous Congress government when PPCC Chief Amarinder Raja Warring was the then Transport Minister. The fabrication of the bus bodies from a private Rajasthan-based bus fabricator has been under the vigilance scrutiny.

While flagging the issue of alleged wrong-doings in getting the bus bodies fabricated from Rajasthan, Chief Minister Bhagwant Mann has mentioned about getting the bus bodies fabricated from Punjab. The government rules require the buses to be fabricated by a manufacturer registered on the Government e-Marketplace (GeM) portal, a public procurement platform to ensure transparency and efficiency. But, Punjab does not have a Centre-certified bus body fabricator.

The vigilance probe was initiated in 2023 after CM Mann questioned the procurement of 841 buses and their body fabrication done from Rajasthan done during the Congress government. It was being probed as to why the bus body fabrication was done at Rs 11.98 lakh per body, whereas it was cheaper if the fabrication was got done from Punjab.