THIRUVANANTHAPURAM: Scores of GPS-enabled electronic ticketing machines in the KSRTC city depot have conked off, forcing conductors to issue tickets manually and many of them keep off duty, unable to bear the additional burden of issuing combination tickets instead of one printout.
Out of the 140-odd schedules originating from the city depot, nearly 40 schedules remain suspended owing to glitch-ridden ticketing machines and staff shortage.
The worst affected destinations are Beemapally, Poonthura and Vettucaud. Out of 15 buses to these places, the number has come to about six buses. The worst impact is felt on special prayer days at places of worship when private buses go for the overkill.
Staff said on condition of anonymity said that battery drain-out was the main issue. As per initial guarantees, machine battery was expected to last 15 hours, the double-duty schedule of operational staff.
Prompt repairs are never done by the Electronic Data Processing Centre, which was recently in the news for disbursing excess salaries and still not able to initiate the recovery.
A city bus staffer on a busy schedule has to service some 1,000 passengers, when s/he has to issue the main ticket plus the cess ticket manually.
“This is backbreaking and we would prefer to exhaust our eligible leave than report for work. The middle-level management, notoriously inefficient and unprofessional, are the least bothered and let the problem fester, leaving passengers high and dry”.
The conductor’s misery compounds if it is a long-distance schedule because s/he has to issue a combination of four tickets manually- the main denomination ticket, the digital fraction for round-off plus two cess tickets.
The GPS has since been disabled on many machines and passengers, who used to track buses through SMS, are now deprived of the facility. The only option for commuters is to ring up conductors on their mobile phones.
The machines, which cost Rs 14,000 apiece, were supplied by a private agency, contractually obliged to undertake prompt repairs. The State’s won Keltron had lost out in the bargain for the supply of machines.
Staffers said their morale was at low ebb because the operations were being controlled by relatively illiterate employees while graduates and postgraduates on line duty, ready to serve the cause of the KSRTC and the public, have no place to go.
