SHILLONG, MAY 27: The state government is all set to implement the Meghalaya Integrated Transport Project (MITP) – which seeks to address the problem of traffic congestion and promote high-end tourism – within 45 days.
Informing this on Friday, Chief Minister Conrad K Sangma told reporters that the MITP not only focuses on road infrastructure but it is a comprehensive oriented EAP (externally-aided project), which is important to look into the different aspects of transport.
He said that the government has decided to implement the first phase of the project which will include four areas – school buses, public electric buses, luxury vehicles and vehicles for agricultural products.
He said the government will sanction a few electric buses and see how the process moves forward.
“Secondly, we will give normal buses or non-electric buses to transport children to schools. This will not necessarily be run by the schools but by the concerned nodal agency or department, which will work out in order to have some organization or society. We will work the system out but the idea is to introduce school buses to allow the traffic decongestion to take place because of the number of individual vehicles that are going to pick up students, we realized there are huge traffic jams.”
He said that the schools do not want to run the bus services adding “therefore we are looking for innovative models and get people who will run the system so buses will be introduced in the schools.”
Further under MITP, Sangma informed that the government will implement the luxury vehicle by sanctioning close to 200 Inovas to entrepreneurs at 50% subsidy.
“We will give it to the youth and tourist operators and whoever wants to apply for this. We will allow them and we will promote these high-end vehicles to be used by the tourists in the state as we feel there is a big gap in that as we are looking for high-end tourists but we don’t have the kinds of vehicles as our entrepreneurs and our taxi drivers cannot afford it sometimes. We want to come in and support them in order to bring up the tourism luxury in the sector,” he said.
Meanwhile, the chief minister said over 200 pickup trucks will also be distributed to entrepreneurs, farmers organizations or societies for transportation of agricultural products.
“Here also 50% will be subsidized by the government of Meghalaya and 50% by the entrepreneurs or concerned farmers organizations and obviously there will be banking loans in this so that the farmer or individual does not feel the pressure of finance.”
Sangma said if the government finds the system is falling into place, it intends to expand it further by giving more school buses, more electric buses , more high end luxury vehicles for tourist operators and pickup trucks to farmers.
He said the project will be implemented within a month or 45 days.
By Our Reporter
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