The Yogi Adityanath Cabinet on Tuesday approved a proposal to upgrade Uttar Pradesh’s bus stands on the lines of airports with an aim to provide an upgraded profile of passenger amenities.
In the first phase five bus stands namely, Kaushambi (Ghaziabad), Vibhuti Khand (Lucknow), Gomtinagar (Lucknow), Civil Lines (Prayagraj), and Agra Fort (Agra) will be redeveloped.
It is expected that CM Yogi will lay the foundation stone for these five projects during Navratri which starts on 15 October.
The transport department has already issued Letters of Intent (LoI) to two bidders selected to develop these five bus stations through public-private partnership (PPP) under the DBFOT (design, build, finance, operate and transfer) model.
The two bidders selected are M/s Omaxe Ltd and M/s AG Enterprises.
Additionally 18 more bus stands have been approved for redevelopment, for which tenders are expected soon.
The 18 bus stations are located in 16 districts, which include Ghaziabad, Bulandshahr, Agra, Mathura, Kanpur, Varanasi, Prayagraj, Mirzapur, Lucknow, Raebareli, Bareilly, Meerut, Hapur, Aligarh, Ayodhya and Gorakhpur.
The inter-state air-conditioned Alambagh bus terminal conceptualized and built by the then Akhilesh Yadav government was the state’s first bus station developed in PPP mode.
The Samajwadi Party (SP) workers ‘inaugurated’ the state-of-the-art bus station that was then touted as the country’s best bus terminal, in June 2018 a day before chief minister Yogi Adityanath was scheduled to make formal inauguration.
Developed and designed by Shalimar Malls Pvt Ltd, a private company, at a cost of over Rs 200 crore, the Alambagh bus station is spread over 26,500 square metre with all passenger amenities.