Odd-even: Staggered timings for govt offices
NEWDELHI: As many as 42 agencies, including Delhi government departments, municipal corporations and the state election commission, will work under staggered office timings during the 12-day odd-even road rationing drive that starts Monday, chief minister Arvind Kejriwal said on Friday.
While Kejriwal also announced that the Delhi government on Friday notified the oddeven drive, transport minister Kailash Gahlot clarified that apart from private CNG and hybrid cars, fully electric fourwheelers will not be exempted from the scheme either. Both the odd-even drive and the staggered office timings will be in force from November 4 to 15.
“Two-wheelers, all-women cars and cars with children in school uniform will be allowed to ply during the road rationing scheme. However, private electric cars, other than CNG and hybrid ones, will have to follow the odd-even rule. This was done from enforcement point of view,” Gahlot said.
Addressing a press conference on Friday, Kejriwal said the practice of staggering office timings is being implemented as an experiment this time and hence, will not be applicable to private companies.“this is the first experiment with staggered office timings. Private offices are not included but next time, we will consider staggered timing for them also,” he said.
As per the order issued by the general administration department, working hours of a total of 42 government offices have been staggered, with 21 having office timings from 10.30pm to 7pm, while the rest will work from 9.30am to 6pm. Senior officials said that on an average, around 75% government offices open at 9.30am and close at 6pm, while the rest of the offices, such as health and education, open at 9am.
To start with, the government will stagger timings of only those offices located in ITO and Civil Lines. Departments, such as the zonal offices of municipal corporations, transport, directorate of education, higher education, irrigation and flood control, state election commission, information and publicity, excise and urban development will open at 10.30am.
In September, Kejriwal had met Lieutenant Governor (L-G) Anil Baijal, and said Delhi would implement his suggestions to stagger working hours.
During the odd-even drive, which starts Monday, the government said that the Delhi Metro will conduct 61 additional trips and a total of 5,100 trips, through 294 trains, will be made per day. Until Friday afternoon, the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) managed to get about 215 private CNG buses against its target of 2,000. Also, the transport department received another 100 cluster buses in addition to the 129 buses that were added last week. These 100 cluster buses will be added next week, which will take the fleet of Delhi’s state-run buses to 5,658.
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