BHUBANESWAR: The State Transport Authority (STA) has collaborated with Bharat Sanchar Nigam Limited (BSNL) for development, management and operation of vehicle location tracking (VLT) application. The Centre has made VLT mandatory for public transport and goods vehicles under the Nirbhaya scheme for women’s safety. An agreement was signed between STA and BSNL for the project on Thursday.
As per the agreement, BSNL will develop, deploy, integrate and commission a vehicle location tracking software for tracking and monitoring of vehicles covered under its ‘Vahan Suraksha’ model. Transport Commissioner Arun Bothra said the tracking system will help in continuous monitoring of public transport vehicles for safety of passengers, better road safety and support for enforcement services. This will also help in keeping track of public buses running as per the permit, he said.
A command control centre is being set up at Bhubaneswar to track the vehicles plying across the State. The 24X7 integrated command centre will use both global positioning system (GPS)-based vehicle tracking and the GSM/GPRS channel for triggering emergency alerts.
The common emergency toll lines, motor vehicles wing, police control room and related enforcement units will be looped into a real-time data sharing network with the command centre functioning as an interface for stakeholder agencies.
Additional Commissioner Transport (Technical) Dhananjaya Senapati said vendors have been approved to fix VLT devices and panic buttons. The State government will soon publish the standard operating procedure for empanelment of the vendors. Thereafter, they will start affixing the devices to both new and old vehicles, he informed.
In order to make the system more robust, BSNL will also develop a mobile application for various stakeholders and users. General Manager Pradeep Kumar Mallick said a geographic information system (GIS) map will also be commissioned for tracking of vehicles’ location as part of the project.