Earlier, these buses were due at Islamabad in February but could not be transported at that time due to the spread of Covid-19 in Shanghai. Later, the city managers had asked the contractor to change the port and send it from Zhenjiang Port.
However, in the meantime, the Capital Development Authority (CDA) after getting strict directions to operationalise the Peshawar Mor-Airport Metro Bus Service from the Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif had successfully managed to start the service using borrowed buses, which were taken from Rawalpindi-Islamabad Metro Bus Service for two months.
Now, the buses originally procured for this project are on the way and will reach Karachi port on 23rd of May and after getting custom clearance, the same would be transported to Islamabad where a test run would be done for a few days and then these buses would be employed on metro track.
The civic agency had placed the order for procuring 12m long buses having orange colour to an international bus manufacturing company called Higer Bus Company, which had submitted a bid of Rs728 million for the 30 buses.
The work on the 25.6km metro bus track worth Rs16 billion was started by the PML-N government in 2017. It was supposed to be completed within a year, however, after the change of government in 2018, the project saw an inordinate delay.
The project was executed by the National Highway Authority (NHA) and last year on the direction of the then government, CDA took over the project and started the process of procuring buses and setting up the command, control and ticketing systems.
Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif on his first day in office, directed the CDA to run the bus service within five days as this project had been delayed for long. On his direction, the officials of CDA and other government organizations remained on their toes and successfully launched the bus service.
Prime Minister had also ordered a probe to find out the reasons behind the long delay in the completion of this project and to fix the responsibility.