BENGALURU: Barely 11 days after the Karnataka State Road Transport Corporation (KSRTC) announced that it was accepting applications for sharing its real-time data for 450 buses in the Mysuru region, the state-owned corporation has already received five applications. The data sharing project — announced a long time back but introduced only this month — will allow app developers to use real-time data to provide information to passengers through third-party apps.
The applications, submitted mostly by app developers and a few students, will now have to go through a vetting procedure by a committee set up for this process. If approved, the applicants will have access to both static and real-time data from KSRTC including position of buses, movement history, speeds, braking parameters, seats filled, punctuality and accident reasons.
“We want to run this pilot with 450 buses in the Mysuru Intelligent Transport Solution (ITS) project first before extending it to 2,000 more buses which are under another scheme. Staging this in parts will help us identify bugs in the entire process,” said a KSRTC official. The corporation was assisted in this effort by a team from the World Bank and other educational institutions and has also worked on setting up intermediate servers which would take the additional load of pushing the data from KSRTC to those approved to access it.
BMTC’s project fails to take off
While the KSRTC might have pulled off the initiative, it’s partner in the city, the Bangalore Metropolitan Transport Corporation, seems to have gone the other way. Both corporations were the first to talk about sharing data gathered under the ITS system way back in 2016. However, somewhere last year, there was a change of opinion at the BMTC which chose to put the project on the back burner. “The current quality of the BMTC app is not up to the mark,” said Varun Chavan, an iOS developer. BMTC couldn’t be reached for a comment.