Mumbai, India’s financial capital, soon will have an integrated smart card-based transit-ticketing system if the plans drawn out by the city’s Metropolitan Region Development Authority play out.
The authority, which is the nodal agency for all infrastructure development in the Greater Mumbai area, plans to establish a system covering all modes of public transport, a spokesperson for the authority tells PaymentsSource. The authority has sent requests for proposal to various technology vendors to create the ticketing system, which would cover the region’s proposed monorail system and the metro rail system and public transport buses, he says.
The plan, however, does not yet cover Mumbai’s decades-old suburban railway network, as its two operators have yet to confirm their participation for yet undisclosed reasons.
“Only Central Railway and Western Railway [have] yet to confirm their participation,” he says. “For now, we will go on without them.”
The authority intends to disclose the names of qualified vendors by the end of February and award a contract by the end of June, the spokesperson says.
The deadline for the project is 2014, by which time “we expect to have a fully functional integrated ticketing system,” he says. “We think that two to three years is a good time frame for a project of this magnitude.”
The cost of the project could reach 3.5 billion rupees (US$67 million or 52 million euros), the spokesperson says.
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