Equipment worth Rs 1.95 crore put in cold storage for 3 years
Picture used for representational purpose. (Photo: DC/File)
Chennai: The much-touted vehicle tracking and control system in MTC buses has been a non-starter for over a decade now and the equipment worth Rs 1.95 crore, purchased by three state transport undertakings for this purpose have been lying idle for more than three years.
The Comptroller and Audit General (CAG) flayed state transport undertakings of Chennai, Madurai and Coimbatore for not analysing the financial feasibility of operating equipment for the tracking system before buying them on large-scale.
The vehicle tracking and control system creates two way communication between on-board units (OBUs) fitted into buses and a centralised server which uses global positioning and geographic information systems to locate the movement of the buses.
In 2008, as a pilot project MTC purchased 495 OBUs at a cost of Rs 83.60 lakh connecting with central data server. But, the operational expense of OBUs, incurred by bleeding MTC, during 2009-12 was around Rs 2.87 crore.
However, soon after the pilot project, in 2009-10 Institute of Road Transport finalised the contract purchase rate of OBUs at Rs 13,000 per unit which saw the MTC, TNSTC Madurai and TNSTC Coimbatore, buying 1500 OBUs costing Rs 1.95 crore, the CAG report said.
But with the operating expense of OBUs touching a whopping Rs 10 lakh per month, STCs which were already facing huge losses, did not put the units to intended use. “While MTC kept the newly-bought units idle without connecting them to the server, the other two corporations did not purchase the required software nor did they set up data centres necessary to put these OBUs into use,” the CAG said.
MTC and Coimbatore STC admitted that they had been unable to operate these OBUs till date owing to financial crunch, the report said.
( Source : dc correspondent )
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