Iran grants funds for launch of 5,000 new inter-city buses amid pandemic
The Iranian government has approved funds needed to supply 5,000 new buses to urban transportation systems across the country to help ease congestion and crowding in cities that are believed to fuel the spread of the coronavoirus pandemic.
An economic deputy to President Hassan Rouhani announced on Saturday that all the new buses will be manufactured by automotive companies inside Iran.
Mohammad Nahavandian said manufacturing will start after Iran’s ministry of industries (MIMT) ensures the supply of imported parts in the next three or four months.
“We hope this decision would both cause a boom in domestic bus manufacturing while it could meet the serious coronavirus requirement of keeping the social distancing,” said Nahavandian after a weekly government meeting to coordinate anti-coronavirus measures.
The official said another decision related to the handling of pandemic and its economic impacts adopted on Saturday was to grant 19 trillion rials in loans to businesses active in the art and culture sector who have been affected by the pandemic-related restrictions and closures in recent months.
The fund , which equals to nearly $75 million, would be available to publishers, bookshops and producers of visual and audio products, said Nahavandian.
The Iranian government has allocated sizable funds to mitigate the economic impacts of the pandemic despite being under financial strains both because of the disease and also a series of American sanctions that have targeted the country’s economy for more than two years.
Billions of dollars have been available to households and businesses both in the form of loans and in grants to help them recover from closures implemented by the government to curb the infection rate.
The number of positive coronavirus cases recorded since late February in Iran exceeded 1.1 million on Saturday, according to health ministry spokeswoman Sima Sadat Lari who said that the daily death rate from the virus had slowed down to 221 from peaks of nearly 500 seen earlier this month.
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