Did the central government reject the Delhi Government’s proposal to make Metro ride free for women?

On 26th June 2019, Times Now News shared a post on its Facebook page. The title of that post was Delhi CM Arvind Kerjiwal announces free rides for women commuters in Delhi Transport Cooperation Buses and Delhi Metro. This title has a website link. The news published in this website says “Big blow to AAP and Arvind Kejriwal as Centre rejects Delhi Government’s proposal for free Metro rides for women.”  This article by Times Now emphasise that central government has rejected Delhi CM Arvind Kejriwal’s idea of offering free rides to women in Delhi Metro. It is being widely shared on the social media. This post received 228 reactions until the facts were checked. 

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Did central government rejected Delhi Government’s proposal to make Metro ride free for women? Let’s do a reality check. 

We started our investigation by searching this news on Google. We found that many Media organizations are publishing this news. Apart from this, we searched few questions under the question search section of the Lok Sabha website. In our search, we found that the central government said it did not receive any proposal from Delhi government for making metro rides free for women. Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri further mentioned in Lok Sabha that they didn’t receive any proposal on free rides to women in Delhi Metro from the Delhi government.

In the PDF given below, we can have a look at the questions asked in the question hour. Professor Saugata Roy raised a query whether the Union government has any proposal for free rides for women in Delhi Metro Train. Responding to his query, Hardeep Singh Puri said that the Centre did not receive any proposal from Delhi government on providing free commutation to women in Delhi Metro.

ANI tweeted that Delhi CM said : Legally Delhi government doesn’t need to send a proposal to Centre regarding free ride for women on Delhi Metro. Delhi Metro & Delhi government is ready to work on this proposal. Being the Delhi CM, I assure women of Delhi that we will implement free metro ride for women in Delhi.

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ANI has published another tweet in which Union Minister Hardeep Singh Puri has admitted that the Central government didn’t receive any proposal on free rides to women in Delhi Metro by the Delhi government

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Conclusion – The claims stating that the central government has rejected the scheme of free rides to women in Delhi Metro are false and deceptive.  The same has been confirmed by the Union Minister and Delhi Chief Minister. The claims made by the social media that central government rejected Delhi Government’s proposal to make Metro ride free for women are unfounded and baseless.