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Yi did not fail - it was dumped

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Written By murali772 - 9 April, 2009

Bangalore BMTC Volvo Citizen Reports public transport

@ Naveen (response to this comment)

Yi did not fail - it was dumped. A more charitable reason is that similar to the matter of their updating of the web-site, the people concerned were lax about going through the tendering process. But, the more plausible reason is that the service provider (for whom I was front-ending the discussions with BMTC) did not approach the "concerned people" in the "right way". And, these concerned people were very effective in side-lining it even with its having the MD's backing, possibly because the MD himself was part of some other racket involving the minister.

And, these concerned people were not comfortable dealing with me, knowing me to be a loud-mouth. When I realised this, I had a frank talk with the MD of the service provider company ( a IIT, Kanpur; 7 years in Infosys background person) to allow me to back out, and to find a wheeler-dealer to handle the BMTC business. He did that, and there was immediate response from the concerned people. But, in the meanwhile, a few other things fell out of place for both the wheeler-dealer and BMTC, and Yi was just dumped unceremoniously.

The calls were certainly not free. And, that was never the problem.

For the six-month trial period, BMTC placed an order on us for a total of Rs 85K, plus taxes, to keep within the Rs 1 lakh per annum limit for non-tendered orders. Even though this did not meet even a fraction of the direct costs involved, we took it up in the expectation of more sustainable levels of compensation under the regular business, once BMTC saw the improvements in ridership. Apart from this were the many other spin-offs that were possible. But, even though there was a measurable improvement in ridership, the "other considerations" were more important for the concerned people, and that was it.

The merry loot goes on even today, possibly on an even bigger scale. What else do you think the grand TTMC contracts are all about? To serve the commuter? Forget it! Of course, the recession may have come as dampener, though.

I have dealt with enough government agencies to see through all these games. Whereas when Socialism ruled the country, we had to learn to live with it all, I can't understand the need to tolerate such nonsense today. There's no option - it has to be an all out war!

Muralidhar Rao

COMMENTS

Intelligent - not sure one can call it that!

murali772 - 26 May, 2016 - 12:42

Starting Wednesday noon, you can catch your bus on time. BMTC is launching the country’s first Intelligent Transport System (ITS) which will give you the estimated time of arrival (ETA) down to the minute, on an app

ITS will integrate the vehicle tracking system, information from electronic ticketing machines (ETMs) and real-time passenger information and make it available on the app. Clicking into the app can help you plan your travel from home. Feed the bus stop from where you want to access the bus and destination on the latest version of the BMTC app, which provides details of buses in the vicinity , and their ETA at the bus stop. You can find them on the city map or see the list.

- - - BMTC director Bishwajit Mishra said, “The control room monitors all data from 75,993 daily trips, and we have developed a dashboard that categorizes the different parameters of operation to know what is happening on the ground. Initially , we are expecting technical glitches because the data we will handle is huge and the biggest challenge is to give the ETA, which cannot be too accurate.“ It will cost BMTC Rs 1.10 crore per month, but EV Ramanna Reddy , principal secretary of the transport department, says it is just 1% of the corporation’s expenditure.

For the full text (emphasis added by me) of the report, in Bangalore5.com, click here.

Finally, they claim to have got it going, but with a caveat "initially, we are expecting technical glitches". The cost supposedly is "Rs 1.10 cr a month". The last we heard the project cost had gone up to Rs 79 cr (see my post of 26th Feb, scrolling above). One wonders if the Rs 1.10 cr is in addition to interest and depreciation on the project cost. The irony of it all is that a large part of it was available over a decade back at a hundredth of the cost.

Besides, I wonder how much of the info provided is relevant today, particularly in view of ZipGo, Ola, RedBus, etc having moved onto newer technologies. Also, I am not sure BMTC has the capacity to keep it going. All in all, it'll be interesting to see how long it all lasts.

cash-less BMTC rides - would like to believe it's happening

murali772 - 18 November, 2016 - 09:39

With demonetization the talk of the town and going cashless the need of the hour, BMTC started cashless rides on a trial basis, last Monday. BMTC managing director Ekroop Caur said the service will be formally launched in January 2017.

The passenger just needs to tap a smart card on an electronic ticketing machine while boarding and alighting the bus, and the fare is deducted from the cash stored in the card. This will reduce the need to tender change to commuters and increase transparency for BMTC.

"The card is in line with the national mission of having a common mobility card. It has specifications where the card can be used for transit and non-transit transactions. The card will be launched for citizens by January 2017. Right now, we are running a trial for our staff to see if all the specifications are working or not," she added.

"The card is in line with the national mission of having a common mobility card. It has specifications where the card can be used for transit and non-transit transactions. The card will be launched for citizens by January 2017. Right now, we are running a trial for our staff to see if all the specifications are working or not," she added.

For the full text of the report in the ToI, click here.

One wonders if this smart card scheme is part of the the much talked about (but yet to see the light of the day) Rs 79 cr ITS scheme, or something anew.

Whatever, I'll start believing it only after I see it in effective operation, since we have been seeing too many gimmckries from BMTC (going by the statements of insiders - check here) to accept these announcements at face value.

Mystery of the international award for a scammed ITS

murali772 - 9 October, 2017 - 11:44

Somewhat surprisingly, Bengaluru’s Intelligent Transport System (ITS) for buses — the first of its kind in India — has been shortlisted with four other cities worldwide in the sustainable transportation category by the C40 Cities Bloomberg Philanthropies Awards in New York for climate-related initiatives.
 
- - - Nagendra, chief systems manager in the Bengaluru Metropolitan Transport Corporation (BMTC), said work on the project had started in 2015 and was officially launched in May 2016.
 
Shiva Subramaniam, a Directorate of Urban Land Transport (DULT) planner working on an ITS master plan with the Japanese International Cooperation Agency for Bengaluru and Mysore, disagrees. “Nothing officially has started as of now,” he told indiaclimatedialogue.net.
 
- - - BMTC says that GPS-based Vehicle Tracking Units have been installed in 6,400 buses. This provides real-time tracking and monitoring of buses, collection of operational data and generation of Management Information System (MIS) reports and two-way voice communication between the bus and the control centre. The mobile app shows the estimated time of arrival for over 6,000 buses in real time, which encourages more people to use this energy-efficient mode of public transport.
 
- - - However, few are even aware that such an IT-enabled system exists in Bengaluru, which is known as India’s Silicon Valley. Many activists are highly critical of the project. Muralidhar Rao, who blogs on praja.in, said: “It has been launched eight times and is not functioning after having spent so much money.”
 
“There is no accountability on how the INR 700 million (USD 10.7 million) budget has been spent,” Sridhar Pabbisetty, CEO of Namma Bengaluru Foundation, a local non-profit, told indiaclimatedialogue.net. “If you to the (Google) Play store, you will find three or four BMTC apps for tracking the movement of buses.”
 
“With Application Programming Interface (API) technology, BMTC is in a position to share data like the location of a bus online and enable a commuter to adopt this technology. This isn’t proprietary data but not being made public, so ITS remains an enigma,” Pabbisetty said. “As someone in touch with citizens’ movements and a public transport user, I have tried to install the app, which takes 10 minutes, and is an ‘almost there, never there’ technology.”
 
Ekroop Caur, former Managing Director of BMTC who has since been transferred, confirmed that ITS had faced a lot of challenges not just externally but also internally. She cited that the project had met a “lot of resistance from within the organisation.”
 
- - - Ashwin Mahesh, CEO of Mapunity, a social technology company and close informal advisor to BMTC, takes a more nuanced view “almost as an insider”. “ITS wasn’t conceived of very strongly till some four years ago. It very much depends on people at the helm, who get transferred,” he told indiaclimatedialogue.net. “What ITS has achieved is to track each bus and traveller by destination and what each passenger is doing. Once ITS is digitised, it makes it harder for operators to cheat. It has forced departments to go digital and this can tell the undertaking which routes to ply on. It has forced compliance and depot staff is incentivised with a share of revenue for efficiency.” He believes that ITS will not benefit people as much as a reform of the bus system.
 
For the full text of the report in the "IndiaClimateDialogue" portal, click here. 
 
Even with its ITS largely a work-in-progress, after spending some Rs 79 cr and celebrating some eight so-called launches, #BMTC getting it a nomination for an international award, is a rare achievement, which perhaps merits an award in itself. Scams are passe' these days. But, this one takes the cake for the brazenness with which BMTC and its cohorts are plainly cocking a snook at the tax paying public.  
 
Besides, going by the comments of the official and non-official experts associated with it, as also the silence of the present honchos, the ITS seems more or less abandoned.
 
Shouldn't the tax paying public be raising some questions?
 

some clarity on BMTC's ITS

murali772 - 27 October, 2017 - 11:34

Here 's a link to an excellent and in-depth report, by Monica Jha in FactorDaily, on BMTC's ITS in general.
 
All in all, the ITS appears like an open-ended experiment, which started in Sept '12, which still seems to have a long way to go, and over which some Rs 79 cr have already been spent. And, given the complexities of govt-owned operations, with all kinds of pulls and pushes they are subjected to, it very much looks like BMTC has taken on more than it can chew, and I am not quite sure it's going to get completed even. Even if completed, I am not sure it will be sustained. 
 
Firstly, BMTC needs to simplify its operations. There have been two reports for switching to direction-oriented operations (from the present destination-oriented), reducing the number of routes to manageable figures, which have been implemented only in part. Its best option, even today, would be to implement either of the reports fully, and farm out the feeder services to private opertors, as per this model, or variations thereof. 
 
But, of course, the various lobbies (to use a softer term), within and without, are not easily going to allow that, and that's where the commuters need to come in and start demanding it. 
 
The report has not covered the financial working. Well, that'll be something interesting to see. And, of course, many questions I have raised earlier remain unanswered.
 
 

cost escalation not quite the reason

murali772 - 26 February, 2016 - 07:43

The backbone of Bengaluru’s critical public transport system (BMTC) hardly paints a pretty picture. By marrying technology with disciplined management, transparency with public connect, can ITS (set for April launch) rev up this system to make it attractive enough for Bengalureans to shed their private cars and SUVs?

- - - ITS is about equipping each of those 6,500 BMTC buses with electronic systems linked to a central control room. The systems include a Vehicle Monitoring Unit (VMU), a camera-linked Global Positioning System (GPS) and an Electronic Ticketing Machine (ETM). The VMU and GPS track the bus speed, time taken to reach a bus station and the driving, rash or otherwise.

For the full text of the report (emphasis added by me) in the Deccan Herald, click here. Alongside, was another report, excerpts from which are reproduced below (full text may be accessed here):

BMTC, now on the threshold of launching its Intelligent Transport System (ITS) could have perfected the same model for its buses 10 years ago. It discontinued a similar, but SMS-based bus-tracking service called Yelli-Iddira?

- - - - The service would have cost BMTC a few lakhs of rupees. Years after Yelli-Iddira was dumped, a tie-up was in the offing for a similar project, but at an estimated cost of Rs 69 crore. This too did not materialise. The ITS project now being prepared for an April launch costs even more. Couldn’t this cost escalation have been avoided had the transport corporation continued and upgraded ‘Yelli-Iddira?’  

The reason is not cost escalation; the more appropriate term would be "racketeering" - an affliction quite common amongst most PSU's - check here. Or, if you choose to be a bit charitable, you could term it an unintelligent way of setting up an "Intelligent Transport System".

‘Yelli-Iddira?’ (Yi) provided the essential info that a commuter needed to know, and at very little cost to him or BMTC. For all of that (perhaps, because of that), it was dumped. Subsequently, Mysore KSRTC, deciding that Yi was not fancy enough, spent something like Rs 15 cr to put together its 'ITS system'. It hasn't been talked about as a model to follow, even by BMTC - see my post of 21/03/14, scrolling above. BMTC then went about tying up with some Trimax, over a Rs 69 cr deal, which was supposed to be launched Independence day last year. It's one year since then, and that too hasn't seen the light of day. A mid-Sept '15 report, cited here, talked about the cost having gone up to Rs 79 cr; we don't know where it'll end ultimately, if it'll end at all.

The only way out of all of this is through an end to the government monopoly in these vital infrastructure services - check here for more on that.

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