BENGALURU: By the end of this year, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC) commuters will be able to purchase monthly digital passes. In June this year, the collaboration between BMTC and Indian Institute of Management, Bengaluru (IIMB) - incubated startup Series-5 labs collaborated to bring out digital daily passes to Volvo passengers. Since then, they have been working on scaling it up. “We had a meeting with officials and are working to integrate the namma pass with BMTC’s Intelligent Transport System.
The day pass in use currently required minimal integration so far. However, to integrate monthly passes for non-AC and Volvo buses, the corporation has to integrate their API (Application Programming Interface) with our system,” said Saro Chandra Bhooshan, CEO of Series-5.
On November 1, CE reported that the integration with monthly passes for all buses would be done in a month. However, this will take longer.At present, the process is cumbersome, due to which only 50-odd people are utilising the daily namma pass, according to BMTC. Commuters are required to show their digital passes to conductors, who note down the token number (an identification number assigned to each conductor) on the passenger’s phone, following which an SMS is sent to the conductor with details of the pass number and its validity. The conductor then enters the pass number on the electronic ticketing machine (ETM). “The current manual process is not sustainable. We are working to ensure that digital passes can be purchased online, and they interact with the ETM without use of token number and SMS to conductors. For this, integration with the ITS is required, which is taking time. It should be ready by end of this year,” said Tanusree Barma, IT director of BMTC.
“What we are working towards with the monthly passes, is to have a daily OTP (one time password) sent to customers each day. This will be valid throughout the day and the conductor need only enter the OTP into their ETM,” Bhooshan explained.The monthly non-AC pass is `1,050 and AC pass is `2,300 plus GST. BMTC is also working on smart cards and a digital ticketing system with use of e-wallets.