BMTC to let pvt firms sell tickets, passes

In the first phase, the BMTC has tied up with Tummoc, a city-based private company offering cashless commute solutions to issue passes

In a major revamp, BMTC has decided to share its data with private firms to allow booking of tickets and bus passes through payment gateways on mobiles, including digital payment systems and united payments interfaces.

“This is a business model where we are basically allowing any company to come and sell our tickets. We will integrate with them and give them our data. This is aimed at commuter convenience,” said A V Surya Sen, the IFS officer heading the BMTC’s Information Technology wing.

In the first stage, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) has tied up with Tummoc, a city-based private company offering cashless commute solutions to issue passes for the Volvo and electric buses through a mobile app.

For BMTC, this is a test bed where the project is evaluated for long-term implications. Officials said lessons learnt from the experience will come in handy when the project is scaled up to include the entire fleet.

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“Our staff (conductors) have already welcomed the idea. More importantly, our passengers are happy. In the coming days, people travelling on any BMTC bus can buy digital tickets from their favourite apps,” Sen said, noting that individual passengers have preference for different apps like Google Pay, PhonePe or Paytm.

The BMTC is also thinking of monetising its data. “The current project (with Tummoc) is being done in-house. The expansion of the project will involve some expenditure. We will find a resource model to sustain it,” he added.

BMTC believes that the cashless ticket project will complement the upcoming ticketing system for which the tender process is ongoing.

Digital passes for Volvo buses

Hiranmay Mallick, co-founder and CEO of Tummoc, said the platform is all ready to offer daily/weekly/monthly passes in the digital mode.

“Tummoc is a multimodal connectivity platform that will suggest both public transport routes as well as the first- and last-mile connectivity. We are ready to issue passes. Testing is already going on to issue tickets,” he said.

As a passenger’s profile is saved on the platform, a digital pass comes with all the necessary details of the identity, which has to be supported by one of the identity cards approved by BMTC.

He said the company will provide about 1,500 electronic ticketing machines (ETMs) to the BMTC. “These ETMs will also issue tickets, besides validating digital passes based on the dynamic QR code system,” he said.

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