National smartcard will be available at Mumbai Central railway station.
After using Mumbai’s 70 lakh commuters as guinea pigs in the experiment on cashless railway ticket cards called Go Mumbai that were issued a few years ago and then discontinued, the Indian Railways has now formulated a foolproof national smartcard that can be used as a cashless ticket on all trains of any type across the country, including the city’s suburban trains.
Trials of the Go India card will now be conducted from Western Railway’s Mumbai Central station. The pre-paid card, based on London’s template of the Oyster Card, promises to be the future of railway ticketing.
At a presentation given on May 26, officials of the Centre for Railway Information Systems, the IT arm of Indian Railways has chosen New Delhi-Mumbai as one of the two sectors for conducting trials and Mumbai Central station in this sector. The other sector chosen for trials is New Delhi-Howrah one.
Go Mumbai was a smart card launched by the railways jointly with a private firm and also used in BEST buses, touting it to be the common public transport card for Mumbai. However, the card was discontinued in December 2010 due to technical glitches.
“The Go Mumbai card may have been temporarily discontinued. But we have learnt a lot on how best we could go about implementing this project. The railways are now signing a deal with banks so that we could now begin it again at a national level and learn from past mistakes,” a senior official said.
The Go India card would be a seamless card used for unreserved tickets/suburban tickets, booking of reservation tickets on all kinds of trains and even retiring and cloak rooms.
At present, the smart card used on suburban railways is a pre-paid card, but is used for issuing physical tickets from vending machines.
According to the Go India project document, “No physical ticket will be issued and the fare amount will be deducted from the e-purse. The passenger will show the smart card at the exit validator that shall debit exact amount of fare and transmit the details through the ticketing server.
Hand held inspection devices will have to be given to the ticket checking staff (TCs/TTEs) to check the validity of contact less smart card and journey.” Railway will not top up the amount.
Topping up of the card will be done by the service provider.
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