GO Mumbai Smart Card for BEST Buses and Mumbai
Suburban Railways
In a move to aid commuter convenience, and to mitigate its cash
handling pains, BEST, 'Mumbai's Lifeline' has adopted a new alternative
method of paying for bus fares. From 2nd January 2007,. The multi-application
card system is called "GO Mumbai" is made available to the desired
commuters. This card is issued as a bus pass.
With the introduction of this system, the multi-application cards
that is widely used by the BEST bus commuters will also be used
by the Central Railway passengers to have cash-less transactions,
both by daily as well as season ticket holders.
The multi-application cards, already in use in countries like Singapore,
Hong Kong, USA, Australia, and Europe works on radio frequency of
13.56 MHz. “The debit card has to be swiped against validators.
The idea behind introducing this system is to aim for total cash-less
transaction with complete security and also to reduce long queues.
The card can be used for passes or tickets in trains and buses.
Each card has an embedded micro-processor chip which reads and processes
the data i.e. the type of ticket bought,” said Prakash Kamat, MD,
Kaizen.
The cards will be available in multiples of Rs 50, with the upper
limit as Rs 5,000. As of now, over 100 service delivery points (SDPs)
have been set up at BEST bus stations from where the cards can be
bought.
The purpose of the ‘Go Mumbai’ card was to have a uniform currency
for various kinds of transactions like paying tolls, paying for
fuel, payments at railway canteens, etc. An agreement is made with
WR and by August the services of Go Mumbai cards will be available
on the Western line too. Also by August, 800 BEST buses will have
validators fixed on them, and the entire fleet will be covered by
March 2009.
THE GO MUMBAI CARD
- The card allows a passenger to travel on trains without standing
in ticket queues
- Commuter has to swipe the card at validators before and after
a journey
- Fare is automatically deducted from the prepaid amount of the
card
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