The Association of Road Transport Undertaking (ASRTU) is looking to lead the development of a common card that can be used across the road transport undertakings (RTUs) of various States.

The ASRTU, which represents 62 State road transport corporations, many of which charge extremely low fares, is looking to drive down the cost of using digital payments, although the process is at a nascent stage. That said, the key challenge is to have a solution that can work as fast as conductors, while ensuring that passengers voluntarily pay for tickets.

Low levels

PS Ananda Rao, Executive Director, ASRTU, told BusinessLine that adoption of digitisation is about 5 per cent in State RTUs.

STU buses handle seven crore transactions daily, which could result in about 2,555 crore transactions a year. “We can adopt 20 per cent of transactions as digital in the first couple of months, and, in a staggered manner, go up to 50 per cent adoption in about a year,” said Rao, adding that the association will be working with National Payment Corporation of India Ltd.

Decisions, such as whether the card will be a pre-paid one that can work on a ‘tap and go’ model, or a swipe card, will have to be finalised, he added.

A big challenge while adopting digistisation in State RTU buses is to ensure a higher level of transaction every minute, particularly when there are peak transactions, Rao said. He recalled that many years ago, bus conductors held currency notes of different denominations between their fingers and could handle many passengers in one minute, apart from monitoring the passengers.

“At present, there is an about 20 per cent revenue loss on account of inability to bill bus passengers. But when we use ticketing machines, will Indian passengers voluntarily pay for the ticket?” he wondered.

In a similar move, Noida Metro Rail Corporation, in conjunction with SBI, on the Rupay platform, is also working on a pre-paid card that can be used in parking facilities as well as buses run by Noida Metro.

This will be on the lines of what is being done by SBI for Nagpur Metro Rail Corporation.

Such interoperable cards are in the works for Delhi Metro as well, which is looking to introduce inter-operable cards for the orange buses run in Delhi by DIMTS and the red and green buses of Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC).

It is not yet clear whether the Delhi Metro Rail Corporation cards, which operate in the Delhi Metro network, including Noida, can be used in the Noida Metro.

For now, keeping up with technology is proving to be a challenge for SRTUs, which have to deal with multiple options for ticket booking.

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