DTC hopes automatic fare collection system will plug losses

Since 1996, the DTC has been receiving loans from the Delhi government to support its expenditure and, in 2012-2013, the DTC’s losses were Rs 2914 crore. An additional Rs 839 crore was allocated to the DTC in the 2014-15 Budget to “meet operating deficit and cost of concessional passes”.

Earlier this month, DTC invited global tenders for the project and the EMD amount for the tender is Rs 25 lakh to “design, develop, build, install, operate, maintain and transfer of automatic fare collection system (AFCS) in entire fleet of DTC”. The system is expected to be capable of handling a minimum of fifty lakh transactions every day.

Officials said with the implementation of the project, each transaction on buses through electronic ticket machines and bus validators will be processed by the centralised fare collection system.

The electronic ticketing machine (ETM), present on the bus, will not just issue paper tickets and validate smart cards — but will also play a key role in generating reports, including the daily collection report, smart card ticket issue report and inspection report. It will also be able to summarise collection of fares at any point and maintain a list of black-listed smart cards, said officials.

The plan also looks to introduce a stock management system at the depot level in order to streamline cash collection. This system, while maintaining the stock of all pre-printed tickets and passes issued, will provide features to allow daily auditing of fare collection by bus conductors.

“This stock management system will issue secured daily passes every day. This will prevent fake passes from being used and their circulation will immediately stop. It will also maintain the daily issue and receipt of expensive infrastructure like ETM units, preventing their theft,” said an official.

DTC officials said that regular reports with respect to revenue collection at buses, passengers board and alighting, usage of smart cards and cash loaded on to it, will be generated on the fare collection transactional data on a frequency that is yet to be decided.