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A committee appointed by the National Green Tribunal (NGT) to monitor cleansing of the Yamuna has beneficial that the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) shift the Millennium Bus Depot because it lies on the river’s flood plain and mentioned it’s environmentally unsafe. The Yamuna monitoring committee, which contains retired NGT professional member B S Sajwan and former Delhi chief secretary Shailaja Chandra, instructed the inexperienced panel that the DTC has been working with out mandatory approvals and discharging waste water into the river.
The committee famous that the DTC had been given a short lived house for establishing the bus depot in the course of the 2010 Commonwealth Games for sustaining and working low flooring buses. At the depot, a number of buses are washed and the waste water is discharged into an open house within the floodplain space, the committee famous. The two-member committee mentioned on inquiry, it was apprised by a DTC consultant that the company additionally repairs and maintains buses on the depot. The DTC is working with out consent, it mentioned. The DTC consultant additionally said that it makes use of 20 kilolitres of handled waste water, taken from sewage remedy vegetation, for washing buses and there was no bore nicely put in on the depot. “The Delhi Pollution Control Committee also stated that hazardous substance like used engine oil and other oils/greases were being discharged and this was not brought to anyone’s notice and had continued for the last nine years,” the committee said in its report submitted to the NGT.
“Such effluent being discharged regularly is certain to go into river water. It will not be environmentally protected or advisable and since such actions are integral to the depot’s functioning, the DTC ought to discover another different house,” it said. This area being on the flood plain is not conducive to maintaining a healthy flood plain, the committee said. The tribunal had earlier directed an environment activist to approach the committee on his plea seeking shifting of the Millennium Bus Depot as it was located on the Yamuna flood plains. The green panel had formed the committee to constantly monitor on a day-to-day basis the cleaning of the Yamuna river.
The matter was transferred to the green panel by the Supreme Court in April last year on the grounds that there cannot be “parallel proceedings” on the same issue. The 50-acre depot was built on the river bank initially as a temporary depot during the Commonwealth Games with a parking space for around 1,000 buses along with various facilities, including five workshop-cum-scanning centres, a logistics centre and two CNG-filling stations.
The apex court had earlier said that ordering demolition of the bus depot would not be appropriate and had granted one year to the Delhi government and the DTC to get the 2021 Master Plan amended, failing which it would have to shift the bus shelter from the Yamuna river banks. The Supreme Court had said an opportunity was given by the Delhi High Court to the Delhi government and the DTC in October 2015 to have the Master Plan of Delhi (MPD) 2021 amended, if it was permissible in law, within six months.
The high court had refused to extend the time to authorities to shift the bus depot, situated next to the Nizamuddin Bridge and behind IP Power Station. The apex court had noted that a chance was given by the high court keeping in view the submission of the Delhi government and the DTC that the “bus depot was constructed to serve higher public objective; the world in query was, as a matter of reality, not falling on the river mattress; and there was no risk to setting or ecology in having the bus depot on the given website”.
The DTC and the Delhi government had challenged the high court’s decision dismissing the transporter’s plea for grant of six months to approach the Delhi Development Authority (DDA) to change the land use of the Millennium Bus Depot site. The DDA had told the court that change in land use was not possible as the NGT had prohibited construction in areas demarcated as zone ‘O’ (river and water-body area) and the site fell in such a zone.
The high court had on October 20, 2015 shot down the DTC’s plea on the issue, saying it was an abuse of the court process to seek extension of time after undertaking to shift it. The high court had also said that it had in 2012 given six months to either shift the depot or change land use of the site and there was “no justifiable motive” now for additional extension.
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