JOIN US The Delhi government’s transport department has virtually put on notice a vendor for cancellation of its contract due to allegedly poor installation and maintenance of GPS units in DTC buses.
“A letter has been issued to Delhi Integrated Multi-Modal Transit System Limited (DIMTS) asking why its contract for the GPS project should not be cancelled,” said a senior transport department official.
The official claimed “on this given point of time, we have no contract with the DIMTS” for the Delhi Transport Corporation (DTC) GPS project.
A spokesperson for DIMTS, an urban transport and infrastructure development company formed in partnership with the Delhi government, denied losing the transport department’s contract for DTC buses’ GPS.
“There is no termination of the contract with the transport department. As far as we are concerned, we are still working on the DTC GPS project,” the spokesperson said, adding the DTC was yet to clear their payments since July.
Sources in the transport department said a lot of letters have been exchanged with the DIMTS over the allegedly non-functional GPS sets in DTC buses – a safety feature introduced after the December 16, 2012 gang-rape in south Delhi.
Officials in DTC also admitted that all was not well on the GPS front.
“The GPS units have been installed in about 3,700 low-floor AC and non-AC buses but about half of them are not working,” said DTC spokesman R S Minhas.
Officials in the transport department said the GPS project’s data was not reaching the DTC whose officials have time and again maintained that the facility was from stable.
Spokesperson for DIMTS denied any hurdle in sharing of GPS-related information and said the DTC officials already have been given access to the data bank that records details of bus movements and other details.
The DIMTS has developed the software for tracking through GPS the movement and other data related to public transport buses.
Apart from the DTC buses, the system is also used in orange cluster buses run by private operators.
Officially, the GPS is called the automatic vehicle locater system.
The software collects information such as the precise location of a bus on its route, speed and its time of entering and leaving a bus depot.