New Delhi, April 29: The urban development ministry has cleared dedicated bus corridor projects in nine cities without letting the row around Delhi’s Bus Rapid Transit System affect it.

BRTS projects will be implemented in Ahmedabad, Rajkot, Indore, Surat, Bhopal, Vijayawada, Visakhapatnam, Jaipur and the Pune-Pimpri-Chinchwad stretch, minister Jaipal Reddy said at a consultative panel meeting today.

A dedicated corridor aims at encouraging car owners to begin travelling by public buses that will get priority on roads. The corridor is a separate lane built by physically segregating the road with dividers.

The Centre will provide Rs 1,602 crore as financial assistance for these projects. The total length of the bus lanes to be built is about 359km. All the projects will have dedicated paths for pedestrians and cyclists, too.

Although the BRTS project in the capital is the Delhi government’s initiative and has received no funding from the Centre, ministry sources said it was unfair to discount the corridors based on one example.

In Delhi, the corridor —which connects the middle-class Ambedkar Nagar to the posh Greater Kailash I — has become a traffic nightmare.

“This is just teething trouble,” a ministry official said. “You have to give the process time. Things will not fall into place immediately. Buses continue to be the major mode of transport for most people and there is a need to invest in improving the system.”

Only 20 of 88 cities that have a population of over half a million have an organised city bus service, sources claimed.

The ministry wants cities to learn from Indore. “Indore has introduced a modern city bus fleet through public-private partnership,” said an official. “It has managed to get electronic boards for display of information. It has made this model a success.”

Other cities keen to replicate Indore’s bus model are Bhopal, Jodhpur, Udaipur, Jalandhar, Ludhiana and Jaipur.