KSRTC plans smart, to go for single IT platform

Bengaluru: Tracking all government buses on a single platform, making payments through e-purse or a smart card and increased safety measures are some of the plans drawn up by the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC).

KSRTC, which has adopted IT-enabled services in several fields ranging from vehicle tracking to depot management, is working on a proposal to the Ministry of Road Transport and Highways to bring the disparate applications and different platforms on to a "central architecture" for improving e-governance.

Officials said while the decentralisation of state transport system into KSRTC, Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, North Eastern and North Western corporations (NEKRTC and NWKRTC) has improved decision making in accordance with the demands of the particular region, the disconnection in the IT-enabled services has led to confusion.

"E-governance is becoming more and more complicated as maintenance of hundreds of servers and data management has become a headache. The cost of maintenance is escalating every year. This is further compounded by the confusion over different software for a single service," an official associated with the project
said.

Earlier, NWKRTC was sanctioned about Rs 60 crore for technology upgrade. However, KSRTC decided to scale up the project to bring all corporations under one architecture instead of allowing further decentralisation.

"A detailed project report with an estimated budget of Rs 300 crore was ready, but it is being revised by a subcommittee due to changes in the central policy. Central aid is being sought by bringing all the corporations under one platform," a source in NWKRTC said.

The KSRTC has now come up with a proposal according to which all the existing IT applications and platforms will be moved to a single platform. "Besides streamlining administration and cutting costs, the new system will allow us to track and monitor all the buses and introduce automatic fare collection," the official said.

As part of the upgrade, a new vehicle health monitoring system will be installed to assess the condition of vehicle. The system will be in addition to the manual checking, ensuring that there are no gaps in the assessment of a vehicle's road readiness.