CUMTA to introduce contactless travel card in city

CHENNAI: Chennai Unified Metropolitan Transport Authority (CUMTA) is planning to introduce a contactless card along the lines of the Oyster Card, which is used to pay for public transport in London.
For this purpose, CUMTA has appointed Transport for London (TFL), a local government body responsible for most of the transport network in London and officials of TFL visited Chennai last week.

“TFL will help prepare the Comprehensive Mobility Plan, integrated ticketing and digital Chennai, where all the plans of agencies working in the mobility sector would be amalgamated,” said CUMTA special officer I Jaykumar. “We are looking at various options,” he said.

Chennai Metro has a contactless card and Jayakumar did not rule out making use of it. Chennai Metro has a deposit card which has a closed loop. “What CUMTA is looking at is an open loop card which will be a co-branded card with any banking partner. It can be used as a debit card,” he said. CUMTA is also awaiting clearance from the Railway Board. “Indian Railways has to take a policy decision since finance and technical sharing of data is involved,” he added.

For appointing a transaction advisor, details have been shared with TFL. “Once they give us suggestions, we will float a tender next week,” he said. Jayakumar also said a consultant will be finalised for preparing the revised Comprehensive Mobility Plan in January.

On the partnership with TFL, Jayakumar said for the first three months TFL will provide inputs for fine tuning CMP tender. Then for the next 18 to 24 months, they will assist in preparing the revised comprehensive mobility plan. Besides, it will also help in setting up a digital Chennai platform, where all the data and plans of stakeholders will be stored.