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Did you know that someone who uses a bus to commute pays much higher taxes compared to the one who uses his own car to travel? Or that the smog in London in 1960s could put today’s Beijing to shame.
The National Transport Development Policy Committee has drafted a set of recommendations to offset the changes in the economic demographics and also modernise the transport segment keeping today’s environment and economic demographics in mind.
The high-level committee headed by Rakesh Mohan, former Deputy Governor of RBI, presented the report to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh on Saturday emphasising some of the key changes needed to take transport to the next level.
“The report sets conditions for a coherent system based transport strategy for the next two decades with the 12th Plan to the end of its 15th,” Montek Singh Ahluwalia, Deputy Chairman of the Planning Commission, told reporters.
Sustainable policyAmongSingh said that in order to enable sustained high economic growth over the next two decades, investment in transport would need to increase from the current about 2.6 per cent of GDP to about 3.3 per cent in the 12th Plan, and then stabilise at about 3.7 per cent of GDP until 2032.
Rakesh Mohan said the integrated transport policy will take into accountnew technologies and environmental concerns also. Some of the recommendations include, a comprehensive and sustainable policy for meeting the transport requirements.
Mohan also pointed that some of the recommendation encouraged a rational mix of various modes of transport in order to minimise the overall resource cost to the economy.
The report also addresses sectoral issues and wider issues that affect the transport system as a whole.
Its focus is on cross-cutting themes underlying transport strategy and the resulting investment programmes.
One of the significant findings of the committee is that there is lack of expertise within the whole transport system: from policy making to designing and execution.
Some of the other recommendations include setting up of a unified Ministry of Transport at the Centre, with similar merger of transport functions at the State-level.
The interim report was earlier submitted to the Government in April 2012.
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