In a concerted effort to combat the evident deficiency in essential bus infrastructure, Greenpeace India joined forces with residents of Delhi’s Sunder Nagri on Thursday to install a bus queue shelter at Sunder Nagri’s designated bus stop.
The bus shelter designed with durability and sustainability in mind was inaugurated by MLA Seemapuri, Rajendra Pal Gautam, expressing gratitude to both the Sunder Nagri community and Greenpeace India for their commitment to sustainable mobility. Gautam also pledged continued efforts to advance bus infrastructure in the area, including the implementation of neighborhood bus connectivity as part of the forthcoming Delhi scheme.
Community members spearheaded this endeavor to improve public commuting accessibility. Equipped with solar lights for enhanced safety, the shelter also incorporates an art space allowing community expression of their public transport experiences.
Deepali from the Sunder Nagri community commented, “In the past, Sunder Nagri’s existing bus shelter was dismantled and replaced by a sign board. The lack of an adequate bus shelter has been a source of inconvenience for local bus users including women, children and differently abled citizens. Daily bus users in Sunder Nagri use public buses for commuting to their workplaces, schools, colleges, for care work etc., and the missing bus shelter has been a major hindrance to accessing public mobility.”
According to recent RTI responses, Delhi currently has 4627 bus stops. However, no data is available on public platforms about the number of operational bus queue shelters within the city. At several locations across Delhi, bus queue shelters are either in poor condition with bare facilities or have simply been removed. The existing bus queue shelters have many issues: there is no information available about bus schedules; there is a lack of safety mechanisms and essential services such as drinking water, facilities for the differently abled, public toilets etc. In 2022, the Delhi government had announced plans to build 1,397 state-of-the-art bus queue shelters, however, no data has been provided on whether these shelters are operational.
A recent opinion poll conducted by Greenpeace India of 300 bus users at Sunder Nagri showed that all the respondents supported the demand for setting up a bus queue shelter at Sunder Nagri bus stand. The demand for adequate bus shelters has been voiced by several communities in areas where the shelters are either completely missing or the existing shelters are in a poor condition. Bus queue shelters can provide an inclusive, comfortable and safe platform for all citizens to access public transport. Moreover, bus shelters can be pivotal to providing relief during extreme weather events such as heatwaves, thereby improving the city’s climate resilience. Hence, Delhi urgently needs to prioritize enhancing its public bus transport infrastructure, especially in the city’s peripheral localities.
Over the month of October, Greenpeace India conducted the sprawling Delhi Bus Tour to bring attention to the need for investing in safe and accessible public mobility. The tour highlighted the challenges faced by women and other marginalised groups in accessing public transport, and provided space for communities to voice their opinions and solutions to the city’s mobility issues. The Bus Tour was successful in gathering the support of over 10,000 citizens to demand increased funding and better infrastructure for Delhi’s buses.
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