Public transport and inter-State vehicles transporting hazardous materials through Kerala will be subjected to real-time monitoring through the GPS-based vehicle tracking system.
As many as 16,000 public transport vehicles will be tracked once the Global Positioning System (GPS) system is put in place by the Centre for Development of Advanced Computing (C-DAC) for the Motor Vehicles Department (MVD).
The government had on January 8 given C-DAC the nod to execute the project at a cost of Rs.6.41 crore accepting the recommendation of the Transport Commissioner to waive the conditions for e-tendering, official sources told The Hindu .
The decision to entrust the work to C-DAC, which prepared a detailed project report, comes after the commissioner wrote to the Transport Department that “only C-DAC has the expertise and technology to be adopted in the implementation of the system.”
Sleuths of the MVD will be able to know the exact location of stage carriers and inter-State vehicles carrying petroleum products. Time enforcement, another vexed issue of private stage carriers, can be executed. The third advantage is that over-speeding can be checked and speed restrictions enforced in front of schools and hospitals through geo-fencing.
C-DAC will set up a master control room, preferably in Thiruvananthapuram, and 17 mini-control rooms, including all district headquarters. The major servers will be placed in the State Data Centre and mini-controllers in districts and three zonal offices of the MVD.
The vehicle tracking unit in each vehicle and the 20-second pulse generated from it will be tagged and certified by the MVD personnel.
The inputs collected will first reach the common database and then will be given to the regional areas for monitoring as it is impossible to track all the vehicles at a single point.
Joint Director (Software), C-DAC, G. Alexander said the facility could be upgraded later to accommodate one lakh vehicles.
