Metro Railway, Kolkata, under the Ministry of Railways, is close to commissioning the Automatic Fare Collection and Passenger Control (AFC&PC) system in all its 23 stations spread over a little more than 25 km.

“We've almost completed the installation of AFC&PC in all the stations and hope to commission the new system soon,” Mr Niraj Kumar, Chief Traffic Manager, Metro Railway, told Business Line . “The job is being executed in collaboration with Centre for Railway Information System (CRIS) at a cost of about Rs 56 crore.”

The contract was awarded to a consortium of Keltron, Thiruvananthapuram, the lead partner, and Indra Sistemas SA of Spain. The work started towards the end of 2009.

Explaining the salient features of the new system, which was vastly improved over the existing 27-year-old system, Mr Kumar pointed out that under the new system, which would be RFID-based contactless smart card and smart token operated system, there would be 280 automatic flap gates, comprising 66 entry gates, 96 exit gates and 118 reversible gates, 207 points of sale terminals, 23 station monitoring PCs and as many station servers, one central server, 60 card balance checking machines, 700 token collection containers and token initialisation and smart card initialisation machines, one each.

“As a cumulative effect of all this, the per minute throughput of passengers in each gate will rise from 45 to 60, depending on the flow of traffic, compared to 25 or so now,” Mr Kumar observed. “We've placed orders for procurement of 700,000 smart tokens and 400,000 smart cards.”

In not-too-distant future when the entire urban transportation system in a metro, as per the policy of the government, would be brought under one umbrella, it should be possible to use the same smart card in various modes of urban transportation in different metros, thus adding substantially to commuters' convenience, he added.

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